Nuevo Leon & Borderlands Rants

<v Speaker 1>What's up. Welcome to the hold on. Let me turn
<v Speaker 1>the we turned Smoky Soul Town. Let me turn Smoky
<v Speaker 1>Soultown down. I got this serious, ex tim Fuck, what
<v Speaker 1>is this? I've just entered Mexico. What is this forty?
<v Speaker 1>Is it telling me to get on? What a pain
<v Speaker 1>in the ass the fucking streets across the border. You
<v Speaker 1>get into beautiful Rainosa with the confetti like garbage all
<v Speaker 1>over the side of the road, and uh, and then
<v Speaker 1>the roads just go haywire. There's like nine I gotta
<v Speaker 1>pay attention to where I'm going. Oh look it's Clematis
<v Speaker 1>Tramundi right on the side of the road there right now.
<v Speaker 1>The border pisces me off. It's so you know, it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't have to be like this, but it is a
<v Speaker 1>militarized border. Anyway. Welcome to another episode of the Crime
<v Speaker 1>Pays It pot and he doesn't podcast. That's a mangled
<v Speaker 1>guard rail. Uh fuck, I'm driving to and away. I'm
<v Speaker 1>driving to Monterey, Monterrey, and uh in the way, we'll
<v Speaker 1>lay on. I'm giving a presentation at the Universe of Dad.
<v Speaker 1>The Universa dot over there and Club de Puyos the
<v Speaker 1>Chicken Club, and it should be fun. You know. It's
<v Speaker 1>the first time I've had like an actual couple hours
<v Speaker 1>to sit down and focus enough to do a podcast.
<v Speaker 1>I got invited to South Texas Comic Con last weekend.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why. It's a little bit different of
<v Speaker 1>an audience than I'm used to, you know, the full
<v Speaker 1>grown adult and superhero costume thing, but it was cool.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a different kind of nerd from science nerds,
<v Speaker 1>and sometimes they overlap on the vent diagram. Damn. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I should have started this podcast like ten minutes from now,
<v Speaker 1>because it's traffic's a little hectic. Look, it's no trees
<v Speaker 1>and a dusty road filled with billboards and fucking commercial detritus.
<v Speaker 1>It's not the prettiest landscape I've seen. But you get
<v Speaker 1>south of Rainosa and it really, like I said, really
<v Speaker 1>brightens up. I said, Wow, you get undulating hills full
<v Speaker 1>of Helieta the barreta as it's called citrus family root
<v Speaker 1>tasting such a wonderful plant. Mike Heap just germinated some
<v Speaker 1>from seed in his nursery, and that's a plant I'd
<v Speaker 1>really love to get into cultivation, and like so many
<v Speaker 1>plants in South Texas, it's much more abundant south of
<v Speaker 1>the border, and it seems to do better south of
<v Speaker 1>the border, where it grows at higher elevations, because most
<v Speaker 1>of Mexico is above three or four thousand feet, and
<v Speaker 1>South Texas is hotter than most places in Mexico unless
<v Speaker 1>they're like on the coast. So anyway, but you know,
<v Speaker 1>it should be a good time. My Spanish isn't perfect,
<v Speaker 1>but apparently a lot of students at the university speak
<v Speaker 1>English because they're better than most Americans. You know, we're
<v Speaker 1>unilinguistic monoly linguistic here. But yeah, So anyway, Comic count
<v Speaker 1>was fun and they gave me free passes, so I
<v Speaker 1>got to like walk around and lurk and look at stuff.
<v Speaker 1>It's an odd crowded times, not gonna lie, but it
<v Speaker 1>was also cool. And I brought my daughter and she
<v Speaker 1>loves Spider Man, which is great. You know, I'm glad
<v Speaker 1>she's into Spider Man and not you know, a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of like weird princess shit. Not that they would be wrong,
<v Speaker 1>but I'm just saying I don't like how society in
<v Speaker 1>doctrinates women to be you know, helpless and weak and
<v Speaker 1>fixated on being pretty and uh, you know, it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of cool that she's uh, you know, at least in
<v Speaker 1>this regard defying that. We also fight a lot. We
<v Speaker 1>wrestle a lot. I have her put on the boxing
<v Speaker 1>gloves and beat me repeatedly. I got some muy type pads.
<v Speaker 1>She you know, she she throws fists at the muy
<v Speaker 1>type pads, teaching her how to punch, and I it's good.
<v Speaker 1>They got her enrolled in jiu jitsu and shit anyway,
<v Speaker 1>So but she had fun and she got to meet
<v Speaker 1>Spider Man too. There was some dude dressed up as
<v Speaker 1>Spider Man. He had like the David Bowie package thing
<v Speaker 1>going on. You know, I ever see David Bowie's package
<v Speaker 1>in the Labyrinth, you know, when he's wearing those tights.
<v Speaker 1>Spider Man had the same thing. It was like it
<v Speaker 1>was there was no obvious I don't know if the
<v Speaker 1>dude was wearing a jockstripp or some but I appreciated
<v Speaker 1>it because it wasn't an obvious. There wasn't an obvious. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there was a package there, but it wasn't
<v Speaker 1>you know, it wasn't the you know what I mean,
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't decipherable, which is good. I appreciate it. Great,
<v Speaker 1>kids safe and so you know, and the dude was
<v Speaker 1>fit too, so it actually looked like Spider Man. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't like not saying anything about the valley, but
<v Speaker 1>you know, it could be hard to find a fit
<v Speaker 1>person in the valley, right, you get like a bully.
<v Speaker 1>So it wasn't like a bowlying pin shaped Spider Man.
<v Speaker 1>It was it was, uh, you know, accurate with the
<v Speaker 1>comic books and whatnotod He's saying, yeah, really cool, and
<v Speaker 1>it's kind of fucked up anyway, So we uh we
<v Speaker 1>did that. And then I didn't think there would be
<v Speaker 1>anybody at the At the event, it was like a
<v Speaker 1>little creator stage thing. It was next to a room
<v Speaker 1>with a bunch of dudes wrestling in it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like WWF style. They had the race and everything. I'm
<v Speaker 1>telling you, Comic Con in South Texas gets wild, man
<v Speaker 1>because it's so fucking hot. It's too hot to go
<v Speaker 1>outside a lot of the time. I mean, I still
<v Speaker 1>do it, but at least during the daylight hours. For
<v Speaker 1>ten months out of the year, you shouldn't go outside
<v Speaker 1>because you just sweat constantly. It's it's like it's it's
<v Speaker 1>way more uncomfortable than southern Arizona. And uh and so
<v Speaker 1>being that it's you know, its bread kind of an
<v Speaker 1>indoor culture, and so the gaming and comic book thing
<v Speaker 1>is really big here. And as someone who used to
<v Speaker 1>be a purveyor of comic books when I was ten
<v Speaker 1>or eleven, I actually worked at a comic book shop
<v Speaker 1>shout out, shout out to Comics Galore in Lagrange, and
<v Speaker 1>the dude would pay me in comics. It was like
<v Speaker 1>totally child labor. I was like eleven years old with
<v Speaker 1>like put comic books in sleeves and then he would
<v Speaker 1>pay me in comics. But it was cool because it
<v Speaker 1>gave me a sense of purpose, you know, much like
<v Speaker 1>mowing launch does for you know, middle aged suburban men,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, putting comic books and plastic sleeves is cooler.
<v Speaker 1>And uh so that was but it was that was
<v Speaker 1>my first job, and I was really into X Men
<v Speaker 1>in Spider Man and all the Marvel comic shit. And
<v Speaker 1>then that was before I got into punk rock. When
<v Speaker 1>I got into punk rock, things change the punk rock
<v Speaker 1>and vandalism and graffiti, then you know, kind of moved
<v Speaker 1>to that, but it was a definite precursor and I
<v Speaker 1>liked the art and I liked you know, I wouldn't
<v Speaker 1>really might didn't have the attention span at eleven to
<v Speaker 1>sit and read an entire comic book. But I would
<v Speaker 1>read sections and then flip through them and collect them
<v Speaker 1>and look at the pictures. And I had a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of like the Marvel superheroes trading cards. Uh so, so
<v Speaker 1>I you know, it was nice to like be back
<v Speaker 1>around that culture a little bit, the comic book culture,
<v Speaker 1>the nerd culture, a different kind of nerd. So that
<v Speaker 1>was cool. And then Sunday we had this last Sunday
<v Speaker 1>we had off, we got someone fucking get off my
<v Speaker 1>ass and buck past. We had someone tailing Uh excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>someone's tailing me. I wasn't going fast enough. I'm rubber
<v Speaker 1>neck in the plant life Mexico. Like I always say, this,
<v Speaker 1>Mexico's land is in such better shape once you get
<v Speaker 1>out of the cities. It's in such better like it's
<v Speaker 1>just not developed. There's they haven't like desecrated it with
<v Speaker 1>BUCkies and gas stations and pawn shops and dollar generals.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, so, uh yeah, so we had a volunteer
<v Speaker 1>day for this. These biking trails near the town I
<v Speaker 1>lived in Mission, Texas, and there was you know, these
<v Speaker 1>biking trails. It used to be a city dump. There's
<v Speaker 1>like mountain bike trails there, which can you know, the
<v Speaker 1>mountain bikers can be annoying, but they can also be
<v Speaker 1>cool because sometimes those guys end up getting into plants,
<v Speaker 1>and they also care about the trails as well. Every
<v Speaker 1>once in a while you get some destruction happening if
<v Speaker 1>they're cutting a new trail or not. But they generally
<v Speaker 1>appreciate being outside. And I appreciate that they appreciate being
<v Speaker 1>outside because again, we got this indoor culture down here
<v Speaker 1>because of the heat and the lack of pedestrian and
<v Speaker 1>bicycle structure. So only two hours and twenty minutes to
<v Speaker 1>the way will Layonne. So anyway, so I've been going
<v Speaker 1>to the spot for a while and there's you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's occasionally rattlesnakes there. It's an old city dump, but
<v Speaker 1>it's been reclaimed by native plants. The only invasives are
<v Speaker 1>the buffalo grass and the guinea grass, both highly invasive
<v Speaker 1>African grasses brought in by ranchers. I'm sure they are
<v Speaker 1>like essential plants in Africa, that's like essential forage plants
<v Speaker 1>for all the cool African wildlife, but here they're a
<v Speaker 1>fucking scourge and they smother plant and they just create
<v Speaker 1>these monocultures of shit. Like the misky will they'll grow
<v Speaker 1>underneath the misky, the guinea grass will, especially buffalo grass
<v Speaker 1>is not shade tolerant. Guinea grass is. Guinea grass has
<v Speaker 1>a branching inflorescence, and then buffalo grass has an inflorescence
<v Speaker 1>penictum that looks like a little pipe cleaner. Like it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't branch, it's just the raceme of little flowers all
<v Speaker 1>clustered together. It looks like literally like a like a
<v Speaker 1>brush or a pipe cleaner of some kind. And they
<v Speaker 1>both sucked. They're both highly vigorous grasses that outcompete all
<v Speaker 1>the cool native cacti and other plants that we get.
<v Speaker 1>So we went in. I was like, you know, I
<v Speaker 1>was there one day and I was like, man, it'd
<v Speaker 1>be so easy to just weed whack this shit because
<v Speaker 1>it all died during the drought or it died back
<v Speaker 1>to the roots. Be so easy to weed whack this shit.
<v Speaker 1>Oh there's the Pemes plant and everyone's just parked out
<v Speaker 1>on the median. Oh, Pemes, let's just shut out the pemes.
<v Speaker 1>Is it the gas? Oh you look, they got a guess.
<v Speaker 1>It's a guess. Okay. Anyway, so tons of cordia bus
<v Speaker 1>the era everywhere to the Mexican Oli. Another Mexican plant
<v Speaker 1>that put in. They produce a big I dug some
<v Speaker 1>up that it volunteered in a vacant lot near my house.
<v Speaker 1>And they've got a big, you know, swollen tap root,
<v Speaker 1>and so I dug them up, cut the leaves off,
<v Speaker 1>potted them up, and then they just form new leaves
<v Speaker 1>and they get going. So I've got more trees for
<v Speaker 1>gorilla planting. I also got permission to plant in front
<v Speaker 1>of the Junior High, the local Junior High too. It
<v Speaker 1>should be good. So I'm sure the city will hate
<v Speaker 1>it because the city of Mission is backwards. It's like
<v Speaker 1>total nineteen fifties. You know, they still love mowing and
<v Speaker 1>kind of hate nature, and you know it's a it's depressing.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a very nineteen fifties outlook. But it can
<v Speaker 1>change slowly. So anyway, we got a bunch of people.
<v Speaker 1>I just put some out on social media. It's like, man,
<v Speaker 1>anybody who's local, come down. We'll weed whack the shit
<v Speaker 1>out of this buffalo guinea grass. I'll get a I'll
<v Speaker 1>pay for a dumpload of mulch. Really got to find
<v Speaker 1>a hookup for some free mulch. Yes, I've tried chip drop.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't work done here. Yes, I've called the tree companies.
<v Speaker 1>It's hit or miss. It's really really hard to get
<v Speaker 1>woodchips down here. But the woodchips are essential because they'll
<v Speaker 1>suppress any of the weed seeds like the buffalo grass
<v Speaker 1>and guinea grass seeds that are surely built up in
<v Speaker 1>the soil. Seed make and so will weed wag it
<v Speaker 1>will if we have some cardboard. I normally don't do
<v Speaker 1>the cardboard thing if it's like a private yard, but
<v Speaker 1>in this case it makes sense to throw cardboard down
<v Speaker 1>because we're not gonna be able to get out there
<v Speaker 1>and do maintenance as much as you know. If it's
<v Speaker 1>someone's front yard, they can just go pull grass whenever,
<v Speaker 1>but they can quickly get out of hand if fits
<v Speaker 1>at a spot that you're not visiting more than once
<v Speaker 1>a week. So anyway, throw some cardboard down through the
<v Speaker 1>mulch on top of it, and then start planting some
<v Speaker 1>of the native shrubs that do well like the legumes that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, build up a deep tap root system first
<v Speaker 1>Sceniso lucophylum for testens, a plant you know, commonly called
<v Speaker 1>Texas stage, even though it's got no relation to stage.
<v Speaker 1>Can I beat this fucking oil taker to this lane closure? Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Are you go fuck off to the fuck up anyway?
<v Speaker 1>Uh so? Uh yeah? So? And we did it in
<v Speaker 1>like two hours. We had the twenty people working on there.
<v Speaker 1>Two hours. We fixed it up and made it look
<v Speaker 1>real nice. Lined the borders with misguait logs, cut back
<v Speaker 1>all the buffalo there's a bunch of the misquiite branches.
<v Speaker 1>We cut those back, use them as borders, you know,
<v Speaker 1>to keep dogs out of the out of the from
<v Speaker 1>pissing on the plants. And you know, hopefully nobody vandalizes anything.
<v Speaker 1>They'll be nice, you know, they don't underestimate people's stupidity
<v Speaker 1>and cruelty. But hopefully it doesn't happen, and and it'll
<v Speaker 1>create a real nice place to go. But for me,
<v Speaker 1>the selfish benefit for me is that now maybe people
<v Speaker 1>might see what we're doing, People who are passing by,
<v Speaker 1>like someone who's just going there to you know, lose
<v Speaker 1>a couple of pounds going to run or you know,
<v Speaker 1>some of the mountain bikers, and they'll start paying attention
<v Speaker 1>to the native plants, which and that's what I want.
<v Speaker 1>That's why it's fucking selfish. I want more people to
<v Speaker 1>know what these are and appreciate them and uh and
<v Speaker 1>appreciate what they got, you know. And there's there's fucking
<v Speaker 1>tortoises here. There's diamondbags, there's indigo snakes. There's all kinds
<v Speaker 1>of cool shit right at this spot. So we'll be
<v Speaker 1>you know, and none of those things can really use
<v Speaker 1>the buffalo grass, so we're creating more habitat for them
<v Speaker 1>to the tortoises eat buffal I'm curious about that. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>they maybe they'll eat a little bit of buffle. I
<v Speaker 1>know they like a lot of the malvacious things. You know,
<v Speaker 1>we get a lot of members of Malvasi, the Malvoidi
<v Speaker 1>subfamily specifically, that are ruteral plants here that are native
<v Speaker 1>weeds that just show up like melvas from americanum and
<v Speaker 1>some of the small butilans and stuff. And I know
<v Speaker 1>the tortoises like those, so you know, I always need
<v Speaker 1>more tortoises. I was out at tord Scrub two days
<v Speaker 1>ago free to have Alena from a pig trip. Thank
<v Speaker 1>God I didn't see him on the trap camera. The
<v Speaker 1>trap camera didn't go off, didn't let me know that
<v Speaker 1>he was in there. And uh, I walked up to
<v Speaker 1>the pig trip up and the poor little bastard was
<v Speaker 1>in there. I would have felt terrible killing a havelena
<v Speaker 1>because they can die from the heat. So but he
<v Speaker 1>was okay. So I got on top of the trap
<v Speaker 1>and let the thing out. He was really pissed off.
<v Speaker 1>He was charging the trap and have Alena's make these
<v Speaker 1>cute little noises with their teeth, this clicking sound. And
<v Speaker 1>they could fuck you up too. They've got sharp teeth
<v Speaker 1>and they'll charge you if you're too close. But I
<v Speaker 1>was on top of the trap. I opened it and
<v Speaker 1>told Louis to get back, and he just you know,
<v Speaker 1>took him a while to figure out that the door
<v Speaker 1>was open, and I wasn't gonna fuck with him, but
<v Speaker 1>he eventually jetted out of there. So and then the pigs,
<v Speaker 1>just the pigs, you know, we got another trap. We
<v Speaker 1>got two or three traps of torn scrub. Now the
<v Speaker 1>pigs weren't going in one. They were digging under it
<v Speaker 1>and they're smart. I need like a remote control AR fifteen,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and like a baited feeding station. That's really
<v Speaker 1>the thing to do because the pigs can smell you,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or like a land mine, maybe like a
<v Speaker 1>baited you know, a land mine you can remote control
<v Speaker 1>it will just blow it, blow it up or something.
<v Speaker 1>It's amazing the damage they do. I don't I know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't need to say it, but it looks like
<v Speaker 1>land mines go off where they've blown or where they uh,
<v Speaker 1>where the pigs show up. So uh but anyway, so
<v Speaker 1>we're free to have Lena from a trap. And then
<v Speaker 1>I saw like three or four tortoises in a span
<v Speaker 1>of fifteen minutes. They always come out at dusk. They
<v Speaker 1>don't come out during the heat of the day. God,
<v Speaker 1>they're so fucking cute. Man. It's it'saw like a juvenile
<v Speaker 1>and a three adults. No diamondbacks, which I expected would
<v Speaker 1>be out too, but none. And then you know, there
<v Speaker 1>was still a We still took it. We're still taking
<v Speaker 1>a hit from the drought. Like stuff is not recovering
<v Speaker 1>as quickly as possible. But again, it's amazing everything that
<v Speaker 1>just you know, it looks like it's dead like Lipia oregonoides,
<v Speaker 1>the Mexican oregano they call it. It's a verbon ac
<v Speaker 1>member of urbon ac. It's a shrub. Smells incredible, really
<v Speaker 1>drought tolerant too, Like it's definitely the plant like if
<v Speaker 1>you plant it in a native garden, it needs full sun,
<v Speaker 1>full heat, and you water it very sparingly, like only
<v Speaker 1>when the soil is bone dry. But that you know,
<v Speaker 1>we've got that on our at thorn scrub. It's pretty abundant.
<v Speaker 1>And I thought they had just died from the drought.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there's a lot of drought deciduous stuff that
<v Speaker 1>will come back, but I thought these had died from
<v Speaker 1>the drought and they would re sprout from the base.
<v Speaker 1>But instead it's they were re sprouting from the woody.
<v Speaker 1>The woody shoots like two feet off the ground, which
<v Speaker 1>was cool. So it was still at these It never
<v Speaker 1>ceases to amaze me how robust and adapted these plants are,
<v Speaker 1>right because I mean, resprouting from the ground is one tactic.
<v Speaker 1>It's like an herbaceous perennial, you know, just like Illinois
<v Speaker 1>prairie plants. But when you can re sprout from the
<v Speaker 1>shoots way up top. You don't have to invest reinvest
<v Speaker 1>all that energy into building woody branches and getting yourself
<v Speaker 1>off the ground. So you know, obviously is a lot
<v Speaker 1>more beneficial just re sprout from the shoots. And they
<v Speaker 1>could do it, like so many of these plants can't.
<v Speaker 1>Karwinsky it does it too. And these are mostly Mexican plants, right,
<v Speaker 1>this is just the northern end of their range. I
<v Speaker 1>can never stress enough how ridiculous geopolitical borders are in
<v Speaker 1>the great span of time. I mean, even you look
<v Speaker 1>at using the Rio Grande as a border, it's fucking
<v Speaker 1>stupid because then you look at the you look at
<v Speaker 1>a satellite map of where the river is now, and
<v Speaker 1>you could see it changes course every hundred years. There's
<v Speaker 1>where soakas and Oxbow Lakes everywhere. You know, it's not
<v Speaker 1>a solid border, It'll change, it changes all the time.
<v Speaker 1>It's a bunch of squiggly lines and old river channels.
<v Speaker 1>So what are they doing here? They're doing some construction project.
<v Speaker 1>And the way we'll I own, I think I'm in
<v Speaker 1>time Alepis now. It's just as fucked for construction as
<v Speaker 1>Texas is. Somebody's getting paid, somebody's getting contract there's probably
<v Speaker 1>a cartel operated enterprise too, road construction. Why wouldn't they
<v Speaker 1>go into it. It's a wonderful cartel's everywhere. It's in
<v Speaker 1>the construction business, agriculture, farming. You know. The least of
<v Speaker 1>what they do is drugs. But anyway, yeah, so, uh,
<v Speaker 1>there's a fucked up power land. I think filled on
<v Speaker 1>what happened. Oh somebody must have hit it. I think
<v Speaker 1>somebody backed up into it with the backo. Yeah, it's
<v Speaker 1>all right, No mane hit concata. Don't drift tired, don't
<v Speaker 1>just don't do it right. Not me. I've got a
<v Speaker 1>fucking leader, a green tea in my lab. I don't
<v Speaker 1>have to take a league soon, which is hard when
<v Speaker 1>the quota's got no shoulder. So uh anyway, but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so I was out of thorn scrub and the tortoises
<v Speaker 1>were all out free to hobby from a trap. Went
<v Speaker 1>and checked. There's not been any pig activity in the
<v Speaker 1>last few days. We got one or two left to get.
<v Speaker 1>I get all these people hitting me up asking if
<v Speaker 1>they can hunt, and it's like, man, it doesn't really
<v Speaker 1>make sense. It's not our property. It's you know, you
<v Speaker 1>might be waiting out there for four days until you
<v Speaker 1>see a pig, and if they smell you, they're certainly
<v Speaker 1>not gonna come around. We need like pro hunters with
<v Speaker 1>thermal scopes and probably dogs. You hunt them with dogs.
<v Speaker 1>It's brutal, it's not pretty, but these are a highly
<v Speaker 1>invasive species. Wow, there's a shit ton of sulfur butterflies everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>Oh my god, how nice. More than we get in Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Because Texas has destroyed all its land. It paves over everything.
<v Speaker 1>Look at how green and verdant this is man ten
<v Speaker 1>minutes outside of Rainosa. Fucking beautiful, the Ahito system. But
<v Speaker 1>this is all communally owned agricultural land, which is what
<v Speaker 1>the Ahiito system essentially is it. So you know, it
<v Speaker 1>makes it very hard to be a shipback developer down here.
<v Speaker 1>But uhh, it'll come one day. I'm sure you know.
<v Speaker 1>The tumor grows, the human tumor grows. Oh smoky, Soul
<v Speaker 1>Town had to stop the piss. This is a really
<v Speaker 1>it's serious. Second, it's like six bucks a month. I
<v Speaker 1>got this. It's supposed to be twenty five or some
<v Speaker 1>obscene bullshit, but I they's offered me a deal. And
<v Speaker 1>then after you know, a year they they count on
<v Speaker 1>you forgetting that it, that you signed up for it,
<v Speaker 1>and then they jacked the price back up to twenty
<v Speaker 1>five bucks. I normally catch it a month and I write,
<v Speaker 1>I call him and I say, I'm gonna cancel. I
<v Speaker 1>don't want you know. Or now they've got it where
<v Speaker 1>you can just do it online. And then every time
<v Speaker 1>you say you're gonna cancel or you ask to cancel,
<v Speaker 1>then they jacked the price back down. It's a strange
<v Speaker 1>business model, but it works in seven bucks a month.
<v Speaker 1>For satellite radio, I can listen to Smoke You Soul Down,
<v Speaker 1>or you know, Willi's Willy's Road where they's road ass
<v Speaker 1>this old country you know, or US. It's kind of
<v Speaker 1>really the only channels we're listening to. Oh what I
<v Speaker 1>Got there's an there's an Aussie station too, that's not
<v Speaker 1>too bad. You like Asie, You like Assi. H got
<v Speaker 1>a friend of mine back in Chicago. He's a good
<v Speaker 1>you know, he's an old friend. He usually man is
<v Speaker 1>a liquor store. Last time I went to go see him,
<v Speaker 1>he was showing me all these pictures of guns here.
<v Speaker 1>He's kind of he's a good guy. He's a little eccentric,
<v Speaker 1>you know his values are good, though. Ah fuck, I
<v Speaker 1>just got a butterfly, and god damn it, why are
<v Speaker 1>they fly in the middle of the road. There's so
<v Speaker 1>many of them. Got sulfurs, we got the white ones.
<v Speaker 1>Don't know, get the fuck? I don't don't. But uh anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I went in there to buy a stogy and into
<v Speaker 1>the liquor store, and I've seen mad and he's in there.
<v Speaker 1>He's like, hey, how you doing. You know, He's like,
<v Speaker 1>I just had a kid. He's you want to see
<v Speaker 1>my guns? He's got all these handguns and shit. You know,
<v Speaker 1>when someone's really opposed to guns, this, no matter what
<v Speaker 1>their politics are, I think they're fucking weird. I'm sorry, right,
<v Speaker 1>it's they're just an unfortunate reality or whatever, fortunate whatever
<v Speaker 1>however you want to look at it. A gun is
<v Speaker 1>just a tool. But you know, you cannot like him.
<v Speaker 1>But when you're really appos like when you get pissed,
<v Speaker 1>like I saw someone got pissed that. I made the
<v Speaker 1>grown if Plants shirt with the AK forty seven on it,
<v Speaker 1>which I thought was fucking hilarious, which is the point
<v Speaker 1>of it. And then you know, I hate that shirt.
<v Speaker 1>I hate it forget where I read it in a
<v Speaker 1>comment somewhere. You got to stop reading comments. There's just
<v Speaker 1>too much shit. But most of like eighty ninety percent
<v Speaker 1>of them are nice, or people are just stoked on
<v Speaker 1>what you do. And then there's always like I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's the fucking internet. So people are mentally ill and
<v Speaker 1>alone and perpetually online and no one's going to therapy
<v Speaker 1>because nobody could afford it, and so they take it
<v Speaker 1>out and act out online. It's just the perfect venue.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a funnel that funnels all the shit, you know,
<v Speaker 1>from like nutjobs and just miserable people. And there's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of miserable people in the current dystopia we're living in,
<v Speaker 1>and so you just got accept that there's there's fucking
<v Speaker 1>kooks everywhere. There's always someone who's got some shit they
<v Speaker 1>want to pull out of their pants with their right
<v Speaker 1>hand and smear on the wall, on your wall in
<v Speaker 1>front of you. Just the way it goes. People are
<v Speaker 1>just fucking nuts and miserable and uh. And then also
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of performance online too, because you can
<v Speaker 1>hit this whole self curated you know, internet bio that's
<v Speaker 1>not really you. You can pretend to be someone else,
<v Speaker 1>and and everybody does it to a certain extent. Some
<v Speaker 1>people do it a lot, but uh, it's all just
<v Speaker 1>you know, human primate social dynamics anyway. Uh, but the
<v Speaker 1>AK forty seven cheer was you know, I thought it
<v Speaker 1>was funny. I thought it was a it's totally it's
<v Speaker 1>like there's no core. First off, there's no correlation between
<v Speaker 1>plants and guns second, which is hilarious. Second it's very aggressive,
<v Speaker 1>which is also I mean, do I need to when
<v Speaker 1>you explain the joke, you kill it right. But this
<v Speaker 1>is I think that's why the style is. I think
<v Speaker 1>a lot of people don't get my style. A lot
<v Speaker 1>of the stiffs I've I've never met anyone that I
<v Speaker 1>actually liked or respected who hated what I did. It's always, uh,
<v Speaker 1>it's always people that seem like, oh yeah, that person
<v Speaker 1>that makes sense, of course I hate what I do.
<v Speaker 1>You know, I kind of Caucasian stiff, you know whatever,
<v Speaker 1>just not fucking wealthy, wealthy background whatever. And then there's
<v Speaker 1>people that are that are all of those things that
<v Speaker 1>like what I do too. But I'm just saying when
<v Speaker 1>it's always the people that always hate whatever I do,
<v Speaker 1>it's always it's always a I can always guess what
<v Speaker 1>kind of person that's going to be, or I'm not
<v Speaker 1>surprised when I find out, you know. But anyway, speaking
<v Speaker 1>to which Peter Raven just passed away rip renowned botanists.
<v Speaker 1>He was actually a big supporter of Crime Phase And
<v Speaker 1>my friend Crystal Ball in Mexico sent me a letter
<v Speaker 1>that an email that Peter had written him two years ago,
<v Speaker 1>you know, saying no, I'd love to come busy you
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico. They were talking about some little Pezia species
<v Speaker 1>he saw, and then he's like, I saw you on
<v Speaker 1>you know, Crime Pays, And you know, I love joy.
<v Speaker 1>I love what he's doing. Some people really don't like him.
<v Speaker 1>But but you gotta remember Peter's in Missouri Botanical Garden,
<v Speaker 1>which I've been on the shit list of some people
<v Speaker 1>there for a very long time. Right, And you talk
<v Speaker 1>about like a face that looks like a puckered butthole
<v Speaker 1>figuratively speaking, you're talking about some of the higher ups
<v Speaker 1>at Missouri Botanical Garden, right, just really like m you know,
<v Speaker 1>just really they're not happy people. They're somebody, not everyone,
<v Speaker 1>but I'm saying the people in question not happy people.
<v Speaker 1>The kind of stiff, certainly very square their their territorial
<v Speaker 1>about their field, and I can see how you know,
<v Speaker 1>they wouldn't like something like crime pace. And there's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of Helianthus annualis on the side of the road
<v Speaker 1>right here. Always thought it was so funny it's the
<v Speaker 1>same species. But when I ordered the cultivar, like the
<v Speaker 1>Russian cultivar of of Helianthus anuis the plant just as
<v Speaker 1>a cover crop, like literally cover crop shade to give
<v Speaker 1>shade to my yard. When I first got established and
<v Speaker 1>there was no cover there was no shade whatsoever. And
<v Speaker 1>I was planting shit in the middle of July, so
<v Speaker 1>you know, and I was hanging shade screens up and
<v Speaker 1>almost bullshit, and you know, realize this is ridiculous. Why
<v Speaker 1>don't I stop doing this with the tea post and
<v Speaker 1>the shade screen shit and just use you know, an
<v Speaker 1>annual sunflowers. They'll be gone by, and they'll be gone
<v Speaker 1>in a few months. I'll just sow the seed directly
<v Speaker 1>in the ground. They'll get big as fuck. So I
<v Speaker 1>got one of those Russian cultivars with the dinner plate
<v Speaker 1>sized flower heads. There's pelophoxia too. Oh, there's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of interesting plants on the side. I'm waiting in traffic.
<v Speaker 1>Now we got Thimafula, we got what is this with
<v Speaker 1>Delia hispida? Oh there's oh god, damn it. What is
<v Speaker 1>that highly drought tolerant, pink flowered MALVASI I can't melochia. Man,
<v Speaker 1>I'm getting old. The genus names don't come so quick.
<v Speaker 1>What is a checkpoint with the cops? And shit, let
<v Speaker 1>me get the papers. You gotta have these vehicle permit papers.
<v Speaker 1>It's a fucking pain in he asked to get. There
<v Speaker 1>was nobody in the office yesterday when I went to
<v Speaker 1>the board. You have to drive into Mexico with your car,
<v Speaker 1>make an immediate you turn, pay a fee, get extorted.
<v Speaker 1>The guy, one of the dudes who took my payment
<v Speaker 1>for the permit thing, it was like, he's like, it's
<v Speaker 1>fifteen bucks, and so of course he took eighteen and
<v Speaker 1>I was like, what the fuck and he just like
<v Speaker 1>looked at me and took the extra three and like
<v Speaker 1>put him in his pocket. I was like, motherfucker, all right, whatever,
<v Speaker 1>it's nothing to me. But I at the show, hold on,
<v Speaker 1>I gotta put this down. I gotta explain to the
<v Speaker 1>cops what I'm doing. Oh, they just wanted to sniff
<v Speaker 1>on me. God, it never fucking annoying. It never ceases
<v Speaker 1>to blow my mind. Whenever you're in Mexico and you
<v Speaker 1>mentioned plants, the cops they always bring up drugs. It's
<v Speaker 1>like the only thing they can think of, you know.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, they ask me what I'm doing. I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>I'm going to going Tonuiva Leona to give a presentation
<v Speaker 1>on plant us and they're like, oh, marijuana a y
<v Speaker 1>huesca noa no plant's silvestrece plant Us nativas. Then I
<v Speaker 1>pointed a fucking monte all around this moron, and I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>you got fucking cool plants all around you, Like everything here,
<v Speaker 1>you know, is native and restricted to this habitat. Type
<v Speaker 1>said the words tom aleapin thorn scrub. He looked at
<v Speaker 1>me like I was fucking I do would I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I didn't say tom aleapan thorn scrub in Spanish, though
<v Speaker 1>maybe I should have fucking more. And then they look
<v Speaker 1>they look at the the papers and everything, and they don't.
<v Speaker 1>You know, in Mexico could be very conservative too, right,
<v Speaker 1>So like I don't have my shirt tucked in and
<v Speaker 1>my hair gelled over and I don't have any hair.
<v Speaker 1>I gotta shave my head after I gave myself a
<v Speaker 1>fucked up haircut in the Philippines. You know, that's really
<v Speaker 1>why I did it. I was too it was too hot.
<v Speaker 1>I tried cut my hair back a little bit. I
<v Speaker 1>just fucked it up because I didn't have a right razor.
<v Speaker 1>So I was like, ah, fuck it, I'll just cut
<v Speaker 1>the Oh, we'll get this rock exposure. Ah, lovely God,
<v Speaker 1>there's just cool shit growing everywhere here. There's buffalo and guinea,
<v Speaker 1>but everything else is native anyway, so this fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>I don't look all clean cutting shit like a good
<v Speaker 1>Catholic boy, right, I like, I only cosplay Catholics. Sometimes
<v Speaker 1>it's not real. Oh, there's fucking self for butterflies everywhere,
<v Speaker 1>undulating hills of tom a leap and thornscrub. It's amazing
<v Speaker 1>how many kids from South Texas. You know, Mexicans have
<v Speaker 1>never been to this side of the border to look
<v Speaker 1>at the plants here. Right, It's just it's the borderlands.
<v Speaker 1>The politics are so fucked up, the cartel shit, the
<v Speaker 1>militarized border on the US side. It's so infuriating, man,
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't need to be like this. But anyway, and
<v Speaker 1>so these cops are just yeah, they looked me over
<v Speaker 1>and they see they were trying to see if there
<v Speaker 1>was a reason to extort me. I showed them the
<v Speaker 1>flyer for the gig I'm speaking at, and then they
<v Speaker 1>still brought up drugs because that's all they can think of,
<v Speaker 1>and they're, you know, measley cop brains, and uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and then they just let me go. They to me
<v Speaker 1>in my way, But it was fucking annoying. It's like, really, drugs,
<v Speaker 1>Like do you think everything's a fucking drug? Like that's
<v Speaker 1>all you got to do is just did more drug
<v Speaker 1>war shit. And of course, you know, the US started
<v Speaker 1>the drug war. Now the US is trying to you know,
<v Speaker 1>the US obviously lost the drug war too, so they're
<v Speaker 1>starting to ease up. But meanwhile, all these other countries
<v Speaker 1>all over the world, because they were sucking the US
<v Speaker 1>as nuts, all got involved on you know, anti drug
<v Speaker 1>bullshit too, and it just created this fucking this atmosphere
<v Speaker 1>where every citizen is a potential enemy and the cops
<v Speaker 1>have an impossible job and rather than going after real crime,
<v Speaker 1>everything is drugs. I'm killing so many butterflies, right, now
<v Speaker 1>it is sad. The grill of my truck's gonna look
<v Speaker 1>like it's papered with confetti. But uh, anyway, yeah, so
<v Speaker 1>onwards towards uh Monterey. There's a lot of phrases in Monterey.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a very white culture there. That's bizarre, right,
<v Speaker 1>It's not like you go to Wahaka and people are
<v Speaker 1>fucking like proudly nate of indigenous ship. It's like Monterrey's
<v Speaker 1>got a very a very Spanish white culture. Phrases. You
<v Speaker 1>know what the code freight, it's like the Spanish word
<v Speaker 1>for strawberry slash yuppie. You know, the friely shits, right,
<v Speaker 1>the fancy labs, the fucking candy asses, the uh, you know, phrases.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you know what a phrase is, right, strawberry,
<v Speaker 1>perfect word for it too, a very descriptive, perfect metaphor. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>God damn that the habitat just that looks amazing around me. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>there wasn't the risk of getting extorted by the cops
<v Speaker 1>or kidnapped by a cartel. I would love to just
<v Speaker 1>pull over and get into it. It's you know, he's
<v Speaker 1>pretty chill. But anyway, so what the fuck was I
<v Speaker 1>talking about? Oh yeah, so Peter Raven passed away. Who really,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the thing like the things I'm always talking about,
<v Speaker 1>like every plants, the product of the habitat that comes from.
<v Speaker 1>He was famous for that, you know, co evolution paper
<v Speaker 1>did with Paul Irlik about you know, coevolution of butterflies,
<v Speaker 1>of lepidopterne, lepidopteranes and plants. And then he wrote a
<v Speaker 1>book too, called Driven by Nature. It's like an autobiography.
<v Speaker 1>Grew up in San Francisco. I first heard of Peter
<v Speaker 1>Raven because there's an arkdolstaphalo species named after him. But
<v Speaker 1>he was, you know, a really nice He was on
<v Speaker 1>the podcast twice and I really, you know, a really
<v Speaker 1>influential botanist. Good dude. Too good for Missouri Botanical Garden,
<v Speaker 1>at least where it is now. I'm just shitting on
<v Speaker 1>them repeatedly. I'm sorry, they just they fucking pissed me off.
<v Speaker 1>They're a bunch of fucking cunts. The HR Department, the
<v Speaker 1>fucking top administrators fired two friends of mine, you know,
<v Speaker 1>replacing cool plants in their in their desert house with
<v Speaker 1>horticultural atrocity to attract rich donors. They're all about that shit.
<v Speaker 1>They're all about the right. They just the fucking h
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's just it's wild, man, it's they're still
<v Speaker 1>stuck in this antiquated East Coast botanical gardens style, and
<v Speaker 1>it's so hard to snap snap people out of that. Right,
<v Speaker 1>I say to the East Coast because a lot of
<v Speaker 1>botanic gardens in the East Coast are like that. They're
<v Speaker 1>like this English Victorian garden. You know, it's where all
<v Speaker 1>the horticultural bullshit comes out of the weeping plant, the
<v Speaker 1>fastigia plant, the cultivars, the showy gardens, the show gardens.
<v Speaker 1>I said, I can always get ship whenever I do
<v Speaker 1>that voice. It's my fucking caring voice. And there's always
<v Speaker 1>some you know, self flagellating, guilty Caucasian personally, it's the
<v Speaker 1>really problematic voice to do that. Anyway, Fuck you. Hopefully
<v Speaker 1>hopefully I've driven those people off from this podcast. Right,
<v Speaker 1>we live in different worlds, pal, you live in a
<v Speaker 1>bubble all right, I'm getting extorted by Mexican cops down here.
<v Speaker 1>What are you doing? Fuck face you fucking anyway, Sorry,
<v Speaker 1>I get a little the fat. I don't need to
<v Speaker 1>be defensive like that. Everyone's trying the best they can't.
<v Speaker 1>You know, everyone's got their own story. They're trying the
<v Speaker 1>best they can. Not everyone's had bad ascid trips. They
<v Speaker 1>can a bus at two am, on a fridge at Chicago,
<v Speaker 1>went the night, or been to jail for a little spell.
<v Speaker 1>You know, think experiences like that tend to be good
<v Speaker 1>for people. Maybe some of these you know, candy asses
<v Speaker 1>can go get some of it anyway. But Peter Raven
<v Speaker 1>had done a lot in this book is pretty good too.
<v Speaker 1>It's Driven by Nature is pretty interesting. Born in San
<v Speaker 1>Francisco at a time, you know, into San Francisco that
<v Speaker 1>no longer exists. God, I would have loved to see
<v Speaker 1>it back then. I mean getting into botany pre uh
<v Speaker 1>pre inin at and smartphones and and all that shit
<v Speaker 1>that gets. You know, that's really influenced. And I think
<v Speaker 1>it's good. I think all that's good. But I'm just
<v Speaker 1>saying back in the day, it wasn't you know, you
<v Speaker 1>didn't just have iinat and you couldn't take photos so readily.
<v Speaker 1>You had to really, you know, go out and collect stuff.
<v Speaker 1>You had to go out and collect plants and really
<v Speaker 1>study them in habitat. I mean, you couldn't even take
<v Speaker 1>photos man, you know, well you you could, but with
<v Speaker 1>a you know, a traditional film camera. I think about
<v Speaker 1>that all the time because photos are so essential to
<v Speaker 1>the study of bondy these days. There it's just such
<v Speaker 1>an easy way to collect data and reference material, to
<v Speaker 1>look at what plant? You know, what you what you saw?
<v Speaker 1>What what species? It is, the photos of the habitat,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. You didn't have any of that back in
<v Speaker 1>the forties and fifties. Man, it was it was just
<v Speaker 1>really you know, collecting or barium vouchers, line drawings, whatever.
<v Speaker 1>I mean. There were challenges, definite challenges. Oh look at
<v Speaker 1>these undulating hills of grain of all these wonderful plants.
<v Speaker 1>Much less of a heat island on this side of
<v Speaker 1>the border too, because you know, it hasn't been turned
<v Speaker 1>into parking lots, so I'm sure that affects the local climate.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe that's the reason that things look a little bit
<v Speaker 1>better as wild. Even if you're in like Tucson or
<v Speaker 1>southern Arizona, the menu you cross the border into Sonora,
<v Speaker 1>the landscape just in my experience always looks more vivid
<v Speaker 1>and alive. You know, I should go back and listen
<v Speaker 1>to that episode of the podcast with Peter Raven as
<v Speaker 1>much as I hate the sound of my own voice,
<v Speaker 1>at least on a podcast, right, But there were two.
<v Speaker 1>There was I forget what the first one. I think
<v Speaker 1>the first one was just a straight up interview with him,
<v Speaker 1>and the second one was we were talking about the
<v Speaker 1>diversification and explosion of angiosperms in the early Cretaceous. And
<v Speaker 1>that one he didn't seem too keet in. He wasn't
<v Speaker 1>very He wasn't really he wasn't really into it. He
<v Speaker 1>wasn't feeling it. I think he was a little maybe
<v Speaker 1>he was a little angry or tired, he was grumpy.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but I should go back, and they
<v Speaker 1>were like from twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two.
<v Speaker 1>You can go back that far and listen. When I
<v Speaker 1>switched the podcast over to iHeart Radio. You know, that's
<v Speaker 1>the company that's responds for all the shitty adds you
<v Speaker 1>here when you listen to this, unless you're in the
<v Speaker 1>Patreon where for five bucks a month you could listen
<v Speaker 1>add free. Thank you for all the Patreons supporters too.
<v Speaker 1>I needed to do I need to do more for
<v Speaker 1>you guys. But but yeah, anyway, when I transferred to
<v Speaker 1>iHeart Radio. They left out some of the older podcasts.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why. Maybe it's for the better though,
<v Speaker 1>because it was really, you know, some of them are
<v Speaker 1>really and you know, as far as I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>do disjointed rants well now, but back then, holy shit,
<v Speaker 1>they were just it was it was off the chain.
<v Speaker 1>Some of them are just like a pinball machine. The
<v Speaker 1>train of thought is just like a pinball, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just all over the place. But yeah, that was a
<v Speaker 1>it was a good interview. With the first Peter Raven
<v Speaker 1>interview or the first episode I did with it was
<v Speaker 1>pretty good. It's pretty interesting, interesting fellow. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>think the thing with some of these cops, the Mexican cops,
<v Speaker 1>depending on where the trams he throws out are worse
<v Speaker 1>like the local ones. Then the state cops can can
<v Speaker 1>be grew up as fuck. I think that's who I
<v Speaker 1>just saw. But I think, you know, people getting nervous.
<v Speaker 1>It's hard not to be nervous when you're around these
<v Speaker 1>fucking idiots, and I think they they can detect your
<v Speaker 1>level of nervousness and that like turns them on, like
<v Speaker 1>they get a dopamine shot because it's obvious control thing,
<v Speaker 1>especially if you're male. You know, male human primates are
<v Speaker 1>geared more towards that, especially depending on what culture you
<v Speaker 1>come from. And so I think they get off on
<v Speaker 1>knowing someone's afraid of them, and then it immediately they
<v Speaker 1>start fucking with you. But every time I'm like getting
<v Speaker 1>stopped by Mexican state cops or going through a checkpoint,
<v Speaker 1>they always ask about drugs, probably because they see the
<v Speaker 1>tattoos and whatever. I don't know, but you know, or
<v Speaker 1>they say something that they you know, they they ask
<v Speaker 1>you where you're going, You tell them where you're going,
<v Speaker 1>they repeat it back to you, like in this kind
<v Speaker 1>of Oh it's so fucking dirty and gross. Gross man,
<v Speaker 1>it's just like they're so sleepsy and corrupt. Not all,
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure not all, but fuck it's that's the culture,
<v Speaker 1>at least among the state cops. Federalites see maybe a
<v Speaker 1>little bit more chill, I don't know. And the transitos
<v Speaker 1>are real slimy. The cops in Mexico are the worse.
<v Speaker 1>They're fucking Oh. So you not only gotta worry about
<v Speaker 1>occasional cartel shit, you also have to worry about the
<v Speaker 1>pigs to the cops. To excuse me, I call these
<v Speaker 1>caps pigs, because they are they really are they that's
<v Speaker 1>just face it. They're fucking dirty and corrupt, and there
<v Speaker 1>are a lot of more assholes anyway, A little slow,
<v Speaker 1>a little fast, excuse me? So uh, I just stopped
<v Speaker 1>the photograph of Malochia tomentosa that was growing in a
<v Speaker 1>in a sea of plastic bottled garbage. But it's just little,
<v Speaker 1>it's just little bits of litter. But then there's none
<v Speaker 1>of the big litter, Like the developments are anywhere near
<v Speaker 1>as abundant here as they are in the US. Right US,
<v Speaker 1>there's not a lot of little litter, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>trash and plastic coverage, but there's a lot of big litter,
<v Speaker 1>my dollar generals, pawn shops, shopping plazas, giant roads, that
<v Speaker 1>kind of thing. I gotta come back Saturday or Sunday.
<v Speaker 1>But man I you know, I got half of mine
<v Speaker 1>to just keep going. Drive down to Wahaka Prowebla or something.
<v Speaker 1>There's a lot of plants I want to see. There
<v Speaker 1>was an interesting number of malpiggy ac that has fruits
<v Speaker 1>that have these like inch long red tricombs on them
<v Speaker 1>that looks fucking wild. I mean the fruit, the tri
<v Speaker 1>coombs I guess are red for wind dispersal and maybe
<v Speaker 1>to attract birds that then picked them up out of
<v Speaker 1>curiosity and dropped them. It began with an l. There's
<v Speaker 1>only like two observations of an I naturalist. My friend
<v Speaker 1>Gabrielle was down then where was it correct throal maybe
<v Speaker 1>and seen it. He's seen it down there. I couldn't
<v Speaker 1>place it was. It was really fantastic, look at small
<v Speaker 1>tree and then it turned out. I asked my friend
<v Speaker 1>Mark Olsen, who teaches at UNAM, and he looked it
<v Speaker 1>up and was able to You know, he knows the
<v Speaker 1>florist so well. But it's amazing. How just you need
<v Speaker 1>more people in Mexico use an I net, You know,
<v Speaker 1>you need more community scientists, just people who aren't necessarily
<v Speaker 1>going to school for this shit but do it because
<v Speaker 1>it fills the void in their soul and makes them
<v Speaker 1>feel better about the contemporary state of modern civilization, right,
<v Speaker 1>which is what botany is good medicine for. Right, every
<v Speaker 1>time you feel like puke, and figuratively or spiritually speaking,
<v Speaker 1>go out and look at some fucking plants or some birds,
<v Speaker 1>or some reptiles or whatever, fungi, whatever the fuck you know,
<v Speaker 1>just get the fuck out. Get out of the human world. This,
<v Speaker 1>you know, brutal, short term loss, long term gain. The
<v Speaker 1>short term gain long term loss paradigm that we have
<v Speaker 1>is a civilization, right now. Get away from all the
<v Speaker 1>dumb shit, the social performativeness, the social hierarchies, all this
<v Speaker 1>grotesque shit, the sociopaths that want money and power. Get
<v Speaker 1>away from all that. Go look at the living world. No,
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't matter what aspect of the living world you're looking.
<v Speaker 1>It's get the fuck out. Go look at the living world,
<v Speaker 1>and almost more importantly, record it, right like get photographs,
<v Speaker 1>use ain at pay attention, study it, learn the names,
<v Speaker 1>learn the pay attention to the ecologies. Pay attention to
<v Speaker 1>the way that plants behave. You know, a plant psychology
<v Speaker 1>is really just how it plants behavior is really just
<v Speaker 1>a psychology and its habit and how it interacts with
<v Speaker 1>things around it. Right, the habitat. Pay attention to the
<v Speaker 1>connection between the habitat and the plants. The habitat literally
<v Speaker 1>breeds the plants the same way that humans have bred crops.
<v Speaker 1>You know, and I say this all the time, it's
<v Speaker 1>my fucking analogy I use. I'm sorry if you're hearing
<v Speaker 1>it againfort in nineteenth time to deal with it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>broccoli col robbie call of flower, Brussels sprouts, all the
<v Speaker 1>same species, bread by people, bread by people, tinkering with
<v Speaker 1>different phenotypes, phenotypic variation, and then you know, establishing it
<v Speaker 1>in a population so that all members of the population
<v Speaker 1>then then display that those phenotypic trades. Right, same thing
<v Speaker 1>they've done with pugs and great things in chihawa's from
<v Speaker 1>the same species as dog. Right, That's what habitats do
<v Speaker 1>to plants. There are so many traits, evolutionarily convergent traits,
<v Speaker 1>that is, things that unrelated plants end up evolving independently,
<v Speaker 1>and they display these traits not as a result of
<v Speaker 1>shared inheritance, but because of the adaptive benefit of those traits. Right,
<v Speaker 1>much like wings for birds and bats, you know, or
<v Speaker 1>fins for sharks and dolphins. To use really easy analogies, right,
<v Speaker 1>there's like the thorn scrub here. I just I was
<v Speaker 1>watering some shit in my yard and I got the
<v Speaker 1>seeds of Corstetia ax hilarius. This shrub to like six
<v Speaker 1>feet in the bean family. I got the seeds. The
<v Speaker 1>fruit's wet. They look like little brown bean pods and
<v Speaker 1>they started exploding. You get them wet a couple seconds
<v Speaker 1>after they start exploding and shooting seed everywhere. Right, that's
<v Speaker 1>a great example of explosive to Hissians, especially in response
<v Speaker 1>to them getting wet, you know, as if after a rain,
<v Speaker 1>just like Ruellia does, right, which is in they can't
<v Speaker 1>they see you get Rouellia seeds wet, they start snap
<v Speaker 1>cracking and snap cracking and popping and shooting seeds everywhere,
<v Speaker 1>and they do it after a rain, which that's also
<v Speaker 1>makes sense that they're not dropping the seeds on the
<v Speaker 1>ground where they can be preyed upon by rodents and
<v Speaker 1>other insects more easily. Instead, the seeds remain protected by
<v Speaker 1>the fruit that they're in by the ovary and only
<v Speaker 1>get thrown on the ground during a rain when the
<v Speaker 1>soil is going to be wet and they can germinate anyway.
<v Speaker 1>But then, of course there's plenty of plants from the
<v Speaker 1>tamalaf and thorn scrub borderlands plant habitat that are explosively
<v Speaker 1>the Hissian even without rain. They just once they get
<v Speaker 1>mature enough. Plenty of members of eupour Ba C. The
<v Speaker 1>rubber and points study of family. Do that Adelia a
<v Speaker 1>ci croton also from the leggan family, throw stem in Mexicana,
<v Speaker 1>make a Mexican Mexican holdback. Stupid name. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>where that comes from. It's a great tree, it's great
<v Speaker 1>native plant gardens, fast growing, good cover. I mean, there's
<v Speaker 1>a shit ton of plants to do this, right, Like
<v Speaker 1>a duel weed up in the Midwest does that in
<v Speaker 1>patients Capensis right, explosive to hissians, right, But it's especially
<v Speaker 1>common among plants in the thorn scrub and especially you
<v Speaker 1>know ones that they get wet and it causes them
<v Speaker 1>to shoot their seed. It's it's you know, you see
<v Speaker 1>the same thing the zigzag branching habit in New Zealand plants, right,
<v Speaker 1>the branching habit the divericate branching. If you want to
<v Speaker 1>look it up, look up divaricating branching or divericate branching
<v Speaker 1>in New Zealand plants and you'll get a ton of
<v Speaker 1>articles on it. Thought to be a response to predation
<v Speaker 1>by MOA's giant flightless birds that are now extinct, that
<v Speaker 1>were driven extinct by the Maori, but upon Anesians who
<v Speaker 1>first hit you know who first landed on New Zealand
<v Speaker 1>in twelve or thirteen hundred, right, But New Zealand didn't
<v Speaker 1>have any large mammals. That just had large flightless birds.
<v Speaker 1>They brows differently than mammals do, and so the plants
<v Speaker 1>there evolved a different defense mechanism, namely creating this cage
<v Speaker 1>like structure with their branches right long, comparatively long distance
<v Speaker 1>between leaf notes, short fascicled leaves and this zigzag branching.
<v Speaker 1>Really really cool heteroblasty among some of the plants in
<v Speaker 1>New Zealand as well. You know, different juvenile and adult leaves.
<v Speaker 1>The juvenile leaves tend to be more armed. Some of
<v Speaker 1>the pseudopanax and the ginsing family Araliac do that really well,
<v Speaker 1>bizarre fucking genus Pseudopanax man. Some of them are really
<v Speaker 1>really cool looking. You know, fire seeds that germinate response
<v Speaker 1>to the chemicals and smoke, like you see in plants
<v Speaker 1>from the California Flora Province, the fire dependent areas of
<v Speaker 1>the California Floristic Province, or the fire dependent areas of
<v Speaker 1>South Africa, et cetera. These are all traits you know,
<v Speaker 1>you study plants in a habitat long enough, you start
<v Speaker 1>noticing traits that have evolved, or traits that you start
<v Speaker 1>seeing traits appear in unrelated lineages of plants. It's fucking incredible.
<v Speaker 1>Now you can literally see how the landscape is breeding
<v Speaker 1>these things into the plants. Right. It's just that that
<v Speaker 1>list of circumstances in that plant habitat selects for different
<v Speaker 1>traits among the plants that grow their right. Plants and
<v Speaker 1>swamps plants and alpine areas like alpine areas of Tasmania
<v Speaker 1>or of the Atacama Desert, where you're at fifteen thousand
<v Speaker 1>feet low latitude of fifteen thousand feet up, you get
<v Speaker 1>a lot of cushion plants, leaf frozets, plants that don't
<v Speaker 1>get very tall, that kind of thing. Right. Azarella compact
<v Speaker 1>the one of the most bizarre plants in the world,
<v Speaker 1>carrot family abac. It's just a bunch of leaf rosett's
<v Speaker 1>I'll smush together and what ends up looking like a
<v Speaker 1>in some cases ten foot wide lump of green green carpet,
<v Speaker 1>like leathery green carpet that just covers rocks and can
<v Speaker 1>live for two thousand years. Right, really fascinating stuff. And
<v Speaker 1>the habitat is the context of everything. Areocarpus phisseratus looks
<v Speaker 1>like a living rock because it grows in a barren desert,
<v Speaker 1>the Chiuahua desert, with a bunch of limestone talus all
<v Speaker 1>over the ground right in that thick cuticle, That thick
<v Speaker 1>waxy layer that makes it look like a living rock's
<v Speaker 1>beneficial both in the sense that it provides camouflage, but
<v Speaker 1>also in the sense that it limits the amount of
<v Speaker 1>damaging intense ultraviolet that can get in, and it limits
<v Speaker 1>the amount of moisture that can be transpired lost through
<v Speaker 1>the stomata. Got the fucking stomata. Jim Masseth, Professor emeritus
<v Speaker 1>at the at UT Austin, showed me a microscope slide
<v Speaker 1>he'd taken the cuticle and the epidermal tissue of Aerocarbus physeratus,
<v Speaker 1>showing these deep pits in this really thick cuticle, like
<v Speaker 1>two hundred and fifty micrometer deep cuticle that you know.
<v Speaker 1>He showed how how hard this these deep pits where
<v Speaker 1>the stomata are, you know, how it looks like a
<v Speaker 1>like you're looking at like a street layer of like
<v Speaker 1>a sewer, like a sewer tunnel right, like a sewer,
<v Speaker 1>a sewer a hole in the ground for a sewer, right,
<v Speaker 1>It's like it goes really deep through this cuticle, and
<v Speaker 1>that of course limits the amount of moisture that can
<v Speaker 1>be lost through those stoemains. Because these things grow out
<v Speaker 1>in the barren open And when you see him dying
<v Speaker 1>in the West Texas desert, you can it gives you
<v Speaker 1>an idea of how bad the drought must have been. Man,
<v Speaker 1>here is some amazing conglomerate formation on top of the sandstone. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>beautiful road cuts. Continuations of the geologic strata layers that
<v Speaker 1>we get in South Texas, like sandstone down below, like
<v Speaker 1>you see in the Roma bluffs above the Rio Grande,
<v Speaker 1>and then that goliad gravel stuff up top. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>see any cata hula formation. Maybe there was keta hula
<v Speaker 1>formation there. Anyway, Uh, got another hour and a half
<v Speaker 1>to drive. I have to stop and piss again. I drink,
<v Speaker 1>I drink these forties of green tea. I gotta take
<v Speaker 1>it easy, you know, maybe it's a it's a diuretic.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it really makes you have to piss a lot.
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to. I don't like paying for the
<v Speaker 1>public toilets here. Oh wait, I gotta pay the fucking tolls.
<v Speaker 1>Hold on a minute. A land clearance that looks terrible.
<v Speaker 1>Oh just went over an amazing little river by General
<v Speaker 1>Brown heneral Bravo. It's little town. Am I in tom
<v Speaker 1>alip is still? Or am I in the way? I
<v Speaker 1>don't know either way. It looked fucking amazing down there.
<v Speaker 1>God damn it. Wish I had time to go. I
<v Speaker 1>gotta stop star, I gotta stop agreen adu see, I
<v Speaker 1>got events, I got events booked up this whole fucking summer.
<v Speaker 1>Kolowe asked me to speak at their native plant thing
<v Speaker 1>in North Carolina. Someone's gonna get banned, someone's gonna get
<v Speaker 1>canceled for inviting me, you know, especially some of those
<v Speaker 1>young college kids. Bless their hearts. Some are good, some
<v Speaker 1>are really amped up, you know, on uh on uh.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they think I'm problematic. They got they and
<v Speaker 1>I don't like the fact that it make fun of
<v Speaker 1>never mind, you know, everybody wants easy answers to the
<v Speaker 1>world's problems, and it's so easy to just paarrot things
<v Speaker 1>that you say online. And it's gonna make fun of
<v Speaker 1>people for anyway. Uh So, you know, someone's gonna get
<v Speaker 1>canceled for inviting me to Klowe. They asked me to
<v Speaker 1>be the plenary speaker. You know, this is a good
<v Speaker 1>heads up. Maybe you want to let them know, Let
<v Speaker 1>the let the speakers at Callowe Native Plant Conference know
<v Speaker 1>that I'm problematic and uh and uh infringing on academic territory,
<v Speaker 1>and let them know that. I don't know, you know
<v Speaker 1>that way, but that way it'll free up my schedule.
<v Speaker 1>In July June, I'm not going on tour. And then
<v Speaker 1>we're doing this. I have to go help lead this
<v Speaker 1>tour for Costa Rica with some mycology people, Alan Rockefeller,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. That'll be fun. And then but I'm showing
<v Speaker 1>about a fifteenth and I guess that's things sold out already.
<v Speaker 1>Costa Rica is so nice. It is weird, though. You
<v Speaker 1>go to the airport and it's all it's all fucking grigos.
<v Speaker 1>It's bizarre. It's unnerving a little bit. But at least
<v Speaker 1>a lot of stuff is protected down there due to
<v Speaker 1>the eco tourism. How many shamanistics how many? You know?
<v Speaker 1>How many come? Mostly? D say Honky shaman, cost D
<v Speaker 1>say quantos, Honky Immensustan in Costa Rica Muchos de Macierro's God,
<v Speaker 1>its the right lane is all fucked up from the trucks.
<v Speaker 1>And then, uh, what, August, I'm gonna be in Denver.
<v Speaker 1>That'll be fun. I've been ignoring emails about what I'm
<v Speaker 1>supposed to do in Denver for the last week. They're
<v Speaker 1>really sweet. I just I get anxiety, you know. I
<v Speaker 1>open my email inbox and I just don't want to
<v Speaker 1>look at anything, and then it just makes me feel
<v Speaker 1>terrible and like I am, you know, going to work,
<v Speaker 1>and then I have to. I just want to go
<v Speaker 1>lay down behind my couch. I don't have a couch,
<v Speaker 1>but if I did, I will go lay down behind
<v Speaker 1>it on the floor and just have a panic attack,
<v Speaker 1>because that's what happens when I look at my email inbox.
<v Speaker 1>I just don't. I just don't respond to a lot
<v Speaker 1>of things because I can't. It's just too much. It's
<v Speaker 1>like too much. My fucking bandwidth was exceeded months ago.
<v Speaker 1>I need to go on some sort of holistic retreat.
<v Speaker 1>Put the phone down, you know, so I can't manipulate
<v Speaker 1>my behavior and piss me off or make me feel
<v Speaker 1>bad or depress me and and just don't get distracted.
<v Speaker 1>It's really fucked my attention spend just you know, allow
<v Speaker 1>myself time to just beat bored and daydream. Still you
<v Speaker 1>should do this too, And and just you know, not
<v Speaker 1>speak for a week or so. I don't, fuck, I
<v Speaker 1>don't think I could do that, honestly, not run my mouth.
<v Speaker 1>You know hard it is for me to not start
<v Speaker 1>singing to the dogs or you know, doing the whole
<v Speaker 1>terrest things start. You know, there's like a different Turet's
<v Speaker 1>feature of them of the month every so often. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's easier, you know, you know, hey, cock boy or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>You just shit, I'll just say, you know, just to
<v Speaker 1>just to break up the silence. I don't think I
<v Speaker 1>could do a silent retreat for ten days. How do
<v Speaker 1>you do that? You have to put duct tape over
<v Speaker 1>my mouth or some shit. I would have to get
<v Speaker 1>my mouth stitch shut with those dissolvable stitches in order
<v Speaker 1>to get me to shut the fuck up for ten days.
<v Speaker 1>I can't do it. I really can't. It's hard, you know,
<v Speaker 1>Oh God. Anyway, I guess it's better than being a
<v Speaker 1>mute or something, you know, or being so shy to
<v Speaker 1>the point of being unable to talk, right, you gotta
<v Speaker 1>lose some people up and then what am I doing
<v Speaker 1>September or September I'm going to the aeroid conference in Miami.
<v Speaker 1>I need to start saying no, man, no, I'm not
<v Speaker 1>gonna do this. No, I can't go speak. Or if
<v Speaker 1>if you want me to go speak, you gotta pay
<v Speaker 1>like decent, right, not like these. You gotta just charge
<v Speaker 1>more money or something, which sucks too. But I just
<v Speaker 1>don't have any fucking time right. I would much rather
<v Speaker 1>be looking at plants, going to cool places than than
<v Speaker 1>doing presentations. It can be fun, but just need a
<v Speaker 1>fucking break, man. You know what, if I'm gonna see
<v Speaker 1>any more tinky winky cops, that's what they always remind
<v Speaker 1>me of. The cop them, the little transititos and you know,
<v Speaker 1>uh uh it' stopped all the state cops AND's gonna
<v Speaker 1>always remind me to tinky winkies, remember that from what
<v Speaker 1>was that? The what was that? Kids show? The tinky winky? What?
<v Speaker 1>What was it? Well? What the fuck? I can't remember
<v Speaker 1>the goddamn name. I'm glad I can't remember the tinky winky.
<v Speaker 1>God damn it, I can't remember the name. It was
<v Speaker 1>like a PBS. I was infuriating. It was an infuriating
<v Speaker 1>kids show and it would you know, just just fucking
<v Speaker 1>stupid too. It was just like stupid, like it was
<v Speaker 1>just I felt like it made kids dumber. Whatever, whatever,
<v Speaker 1>tinky winky caids. Someone tell me what you know? What
<v Speaker 1>don't I don't want to know. Don't remind me. But
<v Speaker 1>that's what I was thinking, like I wanted to see
<v Speaker 1>any more cops. They get so excited. I let the cop.
<v Speaker 1>This cop got really excited when he saw I had
<v Speaker 1>my uh, giant ass backpack. It's like a waterproof chromebag.
<v Speaker 1>It's a fucking ripoff of what it is. Chrome charges
<v Speaker 1>too much money. Now fuck them. You can find a different,
<v Speaker 1>a different bad company. Go with them. I just go
<v Speaker 1>with Chrome because it's what I used to use when
<v Speaker 1>I used to when I was a bike messenger twenty
<v Speaker 1>years ago. But he saw the giant backpack in the
<v Speaker 1>in the shotgun seat and he got all excited. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>this cops eyes lit up like a four year old
<v Speaker 1>child's eyes on Christmas morning. He was so excited. He
<v Speaker 1>was convinced there head to be drugs in there. You
<v Speaker 1>know you got a guy with neck tattoos in a
<v Speaker 1>filthy truck. It's all fucked up on the sides, pinstriped
<v Speaker 1>with you know, uh, scratches from the monte, from the shrubs,
<v Speaker 1>from the thorn scrub. And there's a backpack. And what
<v Speaker 1>could be in that backpack? Holy shit, I don't believe
<v Speaker 1>that it's just a sketchbook, a computer, you know, a
<v Speaker 1>couple changes of socks and a couple of shirts. Right,
<v Speaker 1>it's gotta be drugs. I bet he's got a brick
<v Speaker 1>of cocaine in there and he's bringing it southing to eat.
<v Speaker 1>Fucking moron, what do you think? Hat? You have, fucking jerkop?
<v Speaker 1>You think I'm bringing drugs into Mexico? God damn it.
<v Speaker 1>I just I hate that. You know, when will the
<v Speaker 1>cops in Mexico stop doing that everything's everybody's got drugs
<v Speaker 1>thing and don't incentivize them, when when you getrvs around
<v Speaker 1>cops right instead of just you know, treating them or
<v Speaker 1>assuming you know that they're just like the working class
<v Speaker 1>slabs that they are, which is that's fine, you know,
<v Speaker 1>that's fine in this case they're kind of class traders.
<v Speaker 1>But whatever, you know, and it's just I'm talking about
<v Speaker 1>Mexican cops. I'm talking about it. It's different in the States, right,
<v Speaker 1>The cops in the States are a little bit different,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, they're nowhere near as obnoxious. Is this shit.
<v Speaker 1>The Mexican cops are reported repugnantly corrupt, like just exceedingly corrupt.
<v Speaker 1>But when you act nervous around them, you incentivize the
<v Speaker 1>broken system because they feed off fear. They love that.
<v Speaker 1>That's like a power thing for him. It gives them
<v Speaker 1>a little stiffy, right, God, I fucking hate the cops.
<v Speaker 1>Remember when Andrew Callan Channel five News was doing. He
<v Speaker 1>was interviewing all these migrants crossing the border, and it was,
<v Speaker 1>you know a lot of people like from Central Africa
<v Speaker 1>would come to Mexico and then cross there. And he
<v Speaker 1>was interviewing some of the migrants come from Central Africa
<v Speaker 1>and he was they were they're all just like man,
<v Speaker 1>the cops in Mexico were the worst. The cops are
<v Speaker 1>just fucking horrible. They're worse than the criminals. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the cops are criminals, but they're worse than the criminals
<v Speaker 1>then like cartel, because they just shake you the fuck
<v Speaker 1>down and they just they're just such fucking dirtbags. And
<v Speaker 1>it's one thing to do that when you're a criminal.
<v Speaker 1>It's nothing to do when you supposedly have the law
<v Speaker 1>behind you and you know you can get away with it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, your chicken shit fucking pisces me off, so
<v Speaker 1>fucking ugh. You know anyway, I got distracted. Sorry, I
<v Speaker 1>mean there's always time for corrupt cop hatred to be spewed.
<v Speaker 1>Oh look at this Monthay, look at this beautiful thorn
<v Speaker 1>scrub four five feet tall, extends for miles in ocean
<v Speaker 1>of green. So lovely. Whereas astrophytem could put them aduci
<v Speaker 1>the astrophytum that was only described twenty years ago looks
<v Speaker 1>nothing like any of the other astrophytum species. Looks like
<v Speaker 1>an octopus. Where is it? I was hoping the ones
<v Speaker 1>that I have would produce seed this year, but I
<v Speaker 1>don't think they cross pollinated. I don't know. Need more
<v Speaker 1>more native bees, need more of the native cactus bees.
<v Speaker 1>Some of the macroterras were what's the case with's diodesia?
<v Speaker 1>What's the goblin bee? Ow? There's so many cool native
<v Speaker 1>bees in South Texas. Hi. Welcome to another episode of
<v Speaker 1>Tony's House Tricks podcast. Today we're listening to Jake Antonio
<v Speaker 1>The Groove that Never Stops. Okay, it's kind of sensual,
<v Speaker 1>kind of mystic. He uses a bit of synth and uh.
<v Speaker 1>You know, sometimes when you're coming back from Mexico, you
<v Speaker 1>might end up catching some counterfeit gas. You might just
<v Speaker 1>end up with some counterfeit gas in it. Take might
<v Speaker 1>make your engine misfire, you know, make some weird cranks
<v Speaker 1>and clugs. You never know. But the minute you get
<v Speaker 1>back over the border, you fill up with reg you gas,
<v Speaker 1>and you'll be fine. It'll remedue the situation perfectly. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's just what they do on her sometimes you see
<v Speaker 1>it's a it's a big operation. You know, Cartel got
<v Speaker 1>involved in the gas business and so they you know,
<v Speaker 1>they actually break into the tubes and uh, and they'll
<v Speaker 1>go make their own gas, you know, they make little
<v Speaker 1>mixtures and stuff. Anyway, I'm coming back, Uh it's Saturday.
<v Speaker 1>I can't wait to get uh harassed by the not harassed,
<v Speaker 1>just poked. They just poked. But what are you doing?
<v Speaker 1>You know, what are you doing on? Are you getting drugs?
<v Speaker 1>And then I don't have to go sit in the
<v Speaker 1>fucking line at the border, and I guess the cartel
<v Speaker 1>was doing some roadblock stuff and Rainosa, but I'm not
<v Speaker 1>going through Rainos so proper. We're going going around it. So, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they I guess that the Mexican government captured
<v Speaker 1>some some higher up in the cartel. I think there's
<v Speaker 1>the Gulf Cartel. Instead of throwing a temper tantrum and
<v Speaker 1>blocking off roads in downtown, Reino says, it's just it's
<v Speaker 1>just standard Ferris is what happened anyway, at a wonderful time,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm actually just why are they doing this. They're
<v Speaker 1>making parts of Nuevo Leone look like Texas with the
<v Speaker 1>fucking freeways, you know, one hundred feet in the sky. God,
<v Speaker 1>good luck. Just they the whole city of Monterrey just
<v Speaker 1>held hostage by cars. Anyway, Finally got to see miro
<v Speaker 1>Spermum sussinum in habitat, which is pleasant because Arroyo sweetwood
<v Speaker 1>as it's known, which has been in cultivation in Texas
<v Speaker 1>for like twenty or thirty years now, and it's a
<v Speaker 1>fucking great Let me turn this goddamn music off. That
<v Speaker 1>was kind of a joke, right, So I like house
<v Speaker 1>it's got a time in a place, but you get it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you gotta put it in the back background sometimes.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, Royo Sweetwood, it's a beautiful fucking tree. It's
<v Speaker 1>fabody subfamily, beautiful white pea flowers that smell really really pleasant.
<v Speaker 1>And we've seen it growing in a sarroyo at fifteen
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet with Brocelia liciniata and Senegalia righty I And
<v Speaker 1>there was even already a knackwa there bradge in ac,
<v Speaker 1>which is a common South Texas plant. It's a volunteer
<v Speaker 1>all throughout South Texas. You know, it pops up everywhere
<v Speaker 1>and all the garden beds and shit because the birds
<v Speaker 1>eat the berries and shit out the seats. How do
<v Speaker 1>I get back on a freeway? Now? It should be fun.
<v Speaker 1>The show was good. Bunch of people came out to it.
<v Speaker 1>They were like fifty five people that came out to
<v Speaker 1>hear me speak, even though not all of them spoke English,
<v Speaker 1>and my Spanish is not perfect, so but it was
<v Speaker 1>fucking awesome. It was really, it was really fun. A
<v Speaker 1>lot of a lot of cool people came through hangout.
<v Speaker 1>We went to last and Suela Park in which is
<v Speaker 1>like this little canyon in Monterrey. South of Monterrey, it's
<v Speaker 1>like the gateway to the Sierra Madre. I guess well,
<v Speaker 1>I stake a canyon got all fucked up in the
<v Speaker 1>flood they had two years ago, so you can't get
<v Speaker 1>in there. There's no more getting in there to see
<v Speaker 1>Alba Pelousa Pelosa. Al gave Albo Pelosa. At least not driving.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna have to part of the Some of them
<v Speaker 1>roads got taken out massive flood, but they needed it.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, the show was great. It was really fun.
<v Speaker 1>And uh, and my friend Carlos came out as Tikim
<v Speaker 1>everybody knows as Tiki. Well, I hadn't seen in a
<v Speaker 1>long time. Great to see him. He's like probably one
<v Speaker 1>of the best bodanists in Nuevo Leone. This is how
<v Speaker 1>I fucking get on and god damn it, what a
<v Speaker 1>pain in the ass. I think this is how you
<v Speaker 1>do it. I don't know. These roads are a fuck,
<v Speaker 1>They're a clusterfuck. But yeah, so I saw him and uh,
<v Speaker 1>he brought his wife out to who's great. She studies
<v Speaker 1>native bees. She's I've been hearing about her for a while.
<v Speaker 1>She studies native bees, and uh, this looks thoroughly fucking confusing.
<v Speaker 1>God damn it. Let me put this down for a
<v Speaker 1>minute so I can out. There we go and a
<v Speaker 1>big sign for Reinosa. Here we go, beautiful Reinosa. I
<v Speaker 1>never that's beautiful Reynosa. Taste the flavors of Reynosa from
<v Speaker 1>the burning garbage dump? Where is that point source of pollution?
<v Speaker 1>Every night in my town, I can smell burning plastic
<v Speaker 1>and they do it at night, dude, they don't do
<v Speaker 1>it during to day. I wonder where it comes from.
<v Speaker 1>Is it coming from Reinosa it smells like burning garbage
<v Speaker 1>or is it a factory on the American side. Either way,
<v Speaker 1>it's totally sketchy and it's probably illegal, and I hope
<v Speaker 1>they get caught at some point because they're poisoning the
<v Speaker 1>entire town that I live in. Anyway, Yeah, so, but anyway,
<v Speaker 1>back to mural spermum. Right, it's knowing this plant for
<v Speaker 1>a few years like I have, and loving it, and
<v Speaker 1>they're growing it from seed. We sell ceilings at Limestone,
<v Speaker 1>Tortoise Nursery and Segein. It's planted throughout Austin. I've got
<v Speaker 1>some in my yard. The tree in my yard is
<v Speaker 1>finally flowering, and it's just such a fucking dope plant.
<v Speaker 1>And to finally see it and habit that you know,
<v Speaker 1>is very special, right, and it's get some context for it.
<v Speaker 1>It's like learning the story of a of a friend,
<v Speaker 1>or like meeting a friend's family or something like that.
<v Speaker 1>Well anyway, yeah, so it was it was really cool
<v Speaker 1>to see that fucking plant. The one I saw was big, too,
<v Speaker 1>bigger than any I've seen in Texas. It was like
<v Speaker 1>two feet across. It was growing on the edge of
<v Speaker 1>this washed You know, they're ripe peri and they grow
<v Speaker 1>in the desert, but they're right period they're growing. It
<v Speaker 1>was growing in a dry arroyo bed filled with all
<v Speaker 1>these gravels, and it was seemed like a bit pretty
<v Speaker 1>big floodplain too. It was grown with jug lands microcarpo
<v Speaker 1>with the little walnut which we get in West Texas too.
<v Speaker 1>Had a bunch of West Texas flora there, like shit
<v Speaker 1>you don't see in in the Rio Grand Valley because
<v Speaker 1>it's it's too hot there. So it's it's really point
<v Speaker 1>helps me point out, like you know, there, helps me
<v Speaker 1>realize how unique the area where I live is, the
<v Speaker 1>Rio Grand Valley is hot as fuck. It's hotter than
<v Speaker 1>most of the places you'll see here in Mexico, just
<v Speaker 1>because of how low it is, I suppose, and probably
<v Speaker 1>because it's been turned into a heat island, because you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's there's so much development there, so much. There's more
<v Speaker 1>development in Texas than Mexico. You come to Mexico, the
<v Speaker 1>fucking land is in such better shape. It's amazing. Saw
<v Speaker 1>Ariocarpus trigonus before we went to the arroyo where miro
<v Speaker 1>Spermum was growing. That was cool too. Didn't expect that.
<v Speaker 1>We were driving by some habitat and some undulating hills
<v Speaker 1>and a bunch of scrub and it just looked incredible.
<v Speaker 1>So I stopped and there was Timopla microporoides there, which
<v Speaker 1>is another West Texas plant, and then Ariocarpus trigonus too.
<v Speaker 1>But it looked like donkeys in NIBBLDNA, right, there was
<v Speaker 1>donkey shit. Ever, I know it was the fucking donkeys.
<v Speaker 1>The donkeys do a lot of damage, right, they're cutest shit,
<v Speaker 1>especially when you put them in little hats and stuff,
<v Speaker 1>but they do do a lot of damage to the flora.
<v Speaker 1>And there was a kind of serious Pitchyi a different
<v Speaker 1>subspecies though, and one of the cantas enters berg Mannii,
<v Speaker 1>one of the cactusnerds, identified it for me on Ininett, right.
<v Speaker 1>You know the cactus ands. They go on there every
<v Speaker 1>day and they get alerts and they just bliss their hearts.
<v Speaker 1>It's good for him to, you know, because it's I
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't know what this was. I don't. It would take
<v Speaker 1>me forever to key this stuff out. Way you just
<v Speaker 1>go through a checklist like anyway, It's not the point.
<v Speaker 1>It was incredible habitat. It was limestone substrate, felt a
<v Speaker 1>lot like West Texas, but with elements of the South
<v Speaker 1>Texas flora in there. Cremerio ramosissima was abundant. That hemi
<v Speaker 1>parasitic plant that is, you know, gets about two feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>There was Callandra conferta there as well, which is another
<v Speaker 1>great plant that my buddy Matt Kaufman grew, and I
<v Speaker 1>think I collected seeds from some of the populations in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. In South Texas, it only grows in rocky
<v Speaker 1>areas like on some of the goliad gravels and conglomerates.
<v Speaker 1>Doesn't like deep soils because it'll get outcompeted by things
<v Speaker 1>that get taller than it. It's a mimosoid legome. It's
<v Speaker 1>got really cool flowers that things should be in way
<v Speaker 1>more common and cultivating. All this shit should be way
<v Speaker 1>more common in cultivation. There's such fantastic plants underappreciated, and
<v Speaker 1>they're underappreciated because the horticultural atrocity culture that I'm always
<v Speaker 1>making fun of. That was big too. That was like
<v Speaker 1>a big thing, I think because that ship is so
<v Speaker 1>abundant in Mexico too. You know, the obwellita plants right,
<v Speaker 1>the like Spanish colonial garden style that every people who
<v Speaker 1>came to the talk I did a couple of days
<v Speaker 1>ago at University of Nuevo Leone. You know we're saying
<v Speaker 1>that too. They were laughing at it. Carlos was even like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, that's what you said is dangerous because it
<v Speaker 1>attacks the power structures of you know, ship that I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. I should have asked them to actually explain
<v Speaker 1>that a little bit more. But yeah, I mean that's
<v Speaker 1>you know, that's the ship that people in authority love, right,
<v Speaker 1>the horticultural atrocities, everything neat uniform lines. Uh you know,
<v Speaker 1>when you of course you grow up being in doctrinated
<v Speaker 1>and brainwashed thinking that's what plants are supposed to look like.
<v Speaker 1>You end up hating nature and thinking it's messy. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was cool. It was cool. And then I brought
<v Speaker 1>some merch too, but but I couldn't. I can't sell
<v Speaker 1>them for what I sell them for in the States,
<v Speaker 1>you know, so Tray Santos pacils what I was selling
<v Speaker 1>his shirts for, which is like seventeen bucks, which is
<v Speaker 1>like I make like four dollars off of it. But
<v Speaker 1>that's okay. It's Mexico, right, It's different. It's it's it's unequal.
<v Speaker 1>It's an uneven distribution of wealth in terms of what
<v Speaker 1>people make and shit. So and I was just happy
<v Speaker 1>to get good stuff out there. And then I was selling
<v Speaker 1>stickers for like twenty paesels each like a buck something.
<v Speaker 1>But I should have brought them some books. But the
<v Speaker 1>whole fucking thing was fun, man, it was. It was
<v Speaker 1>so cool, and there were a lot of people that
<v Speaker 1>came out and they were apt and and you know,
<v Speaker 1>people want to get your pictures, the pictures taking with you,
<v Speaker 1>which used to weird me out and not weird me out,
<v Speaker 1>but it would make me f I don't take compliments.
<v Speaker 1>Well right, so I would be like okay, and then
<v Speaker 1>you know, but it doesn't anymore. I'm like whatever, man,
<v Speaker 1>it was just fucking fun. I really wish I was
<v Speaker 1>more fluent than Spanish though, and I will be at
<v Speaker 1>some point, but you know, to the point to be
<v Speaker 1>able to talk shit and run my mouth during videos
<v Speaker 1>like I do in English, that would be, uh, that
<v Speaker 1>would be really nice to do, just because I think,
<v Speaker 1>I guess so many people tell me the videos get
<v Speaker 1>them into plants, and and you need a lot more
<v Speaker 1>people in Mexico into plants, right, like people that aren't
<v Speaker 1>in academia. You need more people use an eye naturalist
<v Speaker 1>and and just getting amped about the flora here because
<v Speaker 1>Mexico has such fucking incredibly cool plants and their habitat
<v Speaker 1>is in such better shape than the United States. Right.
<v Speaker 1>To get a habitat like this, you have to go
<v Speaker 1>to the west, the western United States, where where there's
<v Speaker 1>public land. In the East, it's all been fucked, right.
<v Speaker 1>You gotta smack, you gotta uh smattering of national parks,
<v Speaker 1>but everything's private, everything's been fucked. It's an orgy of
<v Speaker 1>development and greed. It's a tumorous mindset it's gonna eat everything. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>zebra painted highway pillars. I wonder what that's about. That's
<v Speaker 1>that's nice. So yeah, so I got to see miro spermum.
<v Speaker 1>It was fucking great again. If I can describe the
<v Speaker 1>habitat for you, it's these rounded cobbles everywhere, rounded gray
<v Speaker 1>limestone cobbles, you know, weathered out of the surrounding mountains
<v Speaker 1>at some point in the last few million years and
<v Speaker 1>then deposited here. It's dry. It was a broad floodplain,
<v Speaker 1>probably like one hundred yards across, but it was dense.
<v Speaker 1>It was dense woodland boske like mimosoid bosque, uh in
<v Speaker 1>the in between or like filling the whole floodplain. Right,
<v Speaker 1>So you know it gets floods, but only infrequently, but
<v Speaker 1>probably they fucking roar when they come through because a
<v Speaker 1>lot of these boulders each way, like a you know,
<v Speaker 1>a kilo or two, maybe maybe half a kilo, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, not boulders, cobbles, you know, So to be
<v Speaker 1>deposited there, it must take a big flood. But you
<v Speaker 1>know it's it's not a running stream. It's dry. So
<v Speaker 1>but yes, a galia righty eye Jue Glenn's microcarpa. There
<v Speaker 1>was even leather stem jo Tropha diaheca just growing up
<v Speaker 1>amidst the cobbles bunch of Tritax procumbins, which is, you know,
<v Speaker 1>an invasive weed basically everywhere that's not Central America. Triex
<v Speaker 1>is the cool genus, though, goddamn, there are some cool
<v Speaker 1>tritex out there, like Tritex candidissima, the gypsum endemic and
<v Speaker 1>san Luis poto c and Tridex Mexicana I think is
<v Speaker 1>another one. Then there's a Tritex waja kana I forget.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, man, maybe I'm fucking those up. Go
<v Speaker 1>to my iad if you want to see what other
<v Speaker 1>species of Tritex there are as through ac and uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and so this, you know, to see the fucking habitat
<v Speaker 1>of this rare plant. I don't know why it's so rare,
<v Speaker 1>probably just because it's riparian and you know, humans tend
<v Speaker 1>to fuck up creeks a lot. I don't know, but
<v Speaker 1>it's in cultivation in Texas, and that's a plant they
<v Speaker 1>should definitely sell at home, despot, just because it's so
<v Speaker 1>fucking beautiful and it smells so good. And you I
<v Speaker 1>feel like you can get nor means, you know, people
<v Speaker 1>that aren't into bodany or native plants, you feel like
<v Speaker 1>you get into you can get them into a royal sweetwood.
<v Speaker 1>So we usually can get them to appreciate it. It's
<v Speaker 1>such a beautiful tree. It looks kind of like a
<v Speaker 1>locust tree without the spines. And then it's got this
<v Speaker 1>does flowers as fuck. They smell good, so good they
<v Speaker 1>smell anyway. But the interesting thing that the habitat we
<v Speaker 1>stopped that before we went to see the royal sweetwood
<v Speaker 1>was you know, we're there. I just saw there some
<v Speaker 1>cool scrub and there was like mafola and cremeria. There
<v Speaker 1>was Salvia tex aana there too. The habitat we stopped
<v Speaker 1>at there climbing up that was you know, I was like,
<v Speaker 1>let's go to the hill. Go up these hills because
<v Speaker 1>it probably changes a little bit. It's a little bit drier.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna see a different composition of plants. And sure enough,
<v Speaker 1>you get up there and there was fucking manahat Subspacatta. Shit,
<v Speaker 1>did I go the wrong way? What a fucking pain
<v Speaker 1>in the ass. What's going on here? Oh damn it? Oops?
<v Speaker 1>I think I went the wrong way. Oh, hold on,
<v Speaker 1>I did go wrong way. Let me put this down.
<v Speaker 1>That's a fucking panting ass. You know this. Google Maps
<v Speaker 1>just sucks so much. I used to be so good
<v Speaker 1>at navigating. That's a beautiful monazuma Cyprus woodland. Oh, it's
<v Speaker 1>all draped in Spanish moss, got mountains in the background.
<v Speaker 1>Going over this bridge that just went like twenty minutes
<v Speaker 1>out of the way. Well it's gonna end up twenty minutes.
<v Speaker 1>I missed the I missed the curve because it didn't
<v Speaker 1>notify me. Right, But anyway, but yet, so God, there's
<v Speaker 1>the habitat here that lant is just so nice. So
<v Speaker 1>Manahat subspacata that grows in one place. I've only seen
<v Speaker 1>a single plant in the Corpus Christie area growing with
<v Speaker 1>Kama Crista gregy ie that other weird you know, park
<v Speaker 1>Fridge Peak. We get Cama Crista fisiculada in the States
<v Speaker 1>and it's more of like an herb. But but this
<v Speaker 1>thing is a shrub Cama crista greggy, and that that
<v Speaker 1>grows with Mannahat subspecata, and it was grown with it
<v Speaker 1>here too, And they grow at this one little area
<v Speaker 1>in Corpus Christie and those are the only places in
<v Speaker 1>Texas that they grow, like right kind of near Lake
<v Speaker 1>Corpus Christie off Boat Ramp Road and some you know,
<v Speaker 1>some jagavhones. It's there's private property signs up everywhere. You
<v Speaker 1>got a trespass if you want to go look at it.
<v Speaker 1>But it's so curious to me. It's like, why did
<v Speaker 1>these all these same plants out Here's a pemix. I
<v Speaker 1>gotta get guess. Anyway, all these same plants, Uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>do you see occurring together here also occur together over there?
<v Speaker 1>Was there at one point the continuous distribution or was
<v Speaker 1>it just a dispersal event, just chance dispersal of the
<v Speaker 1>same flora. It really makes you wonder, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>how far back does it go? Like does did this
<v Speaker 1>this divergence happen between these two populations? Yeah, it was
<v Speaker 1>really cool. I did not expect to see manahat subspecatta there,
<v Speaker 1>which is again an extremely rare plant. It's a rare
<v Speaker 1>plant in the Waveling Own. It's even more rare in Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Manahat is the genus of the plant known as yuca,
<v Speaker 1>which gets eaten for its edible, tuberous roots. That's Mannahat esculenta.
<v Speaker 1>And this, uh yeah, Manahat subspectata is a little bit more.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if you get I don't think you
<v Speaker 1>can eat. It's probably toxic or something. But I'm seeing
<v Speaker 1>this waiting line. It shouldn't be too painful, mildly painful.
<v Speaker 1>We'll see you. You know, the magna. But there's this
<v Speaker 1>guy with a stick around the back of his chilic.
<v Speaker 1>It says, yo yo, love tigers, d grays. It's nice.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder what he is. That a slang words it
<v Speaker 1>like cougar's. He's saying he loves cougars to each their
<v Speaker 1>own pal right to each their own. Anyway, Mannahat subspeccata
<v Speaker 1>growing with with komara. God fuck, everything was flowering too.
<v Speaker 1>There was a really pretty line um there, really pretty
<v Speaker 1>flax with those bright orange flowers. It was just gore.
<v Speaker 1>Just everything was lit up, man right, and they got
<v Speaker 1>got some rain. So yeah, anyway, that was cool. So
<v Speaker 1>the man A substiticated was flowering. It was fruit and
<v Speaker 1>got some nice money shots, some good pictures of it.
<v Speaker 1>Then then there was neo Pringlia integrafolio, which is a
<v Speaker 1>plant that should really be in cultivation in Texas. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know why it doesn't get into South Texas at all.
<v Speaker 1>I feel like there must have been a population there
<v Speaker 1>at some point because the habit it's not that far away.
<v Speaker 1>In the habitat is so similar. This is a tree
<v Speaker 1>that's in the family Salea Casey. It's in the willow family,
<v Speaker 1>and it's it's cool. I would love to grow it.
<v Speaker 1>It loves full sun, it grows in the scrub, It's
<v Speaker 1>tough as nails, and it occurs throughout Mexico. I wonder
<v Speaker 1>at some point did it occur in South Texas and
<v Speaker 1>the thorn scrubs somewhere then it got destroyed. It's like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's like helliada parvafoyia, which does occur in Texas,
<v Speaker 1>and it's also a small tree and is also much
<v Speaker 1>more common in the same habitat throughout Mexico. Why do
<v Speaker 1>we have hell but not the neo pringlea? So anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so lots of fascinating shit. I saw hesperallo too. I
<v Speaker 1>think it was if it was funifera or a hybrid
<v Speaker 1>between Funifera and parvifolia. You know, Hesperallo is uh. They
<v Speaker 1>look like a cross between philiferous yucca and a small agave,
<v Speaker 1>and then they get a big flower stock with a
<v Speaker 1>companiulate bell shaped flower. There was a Gave univitata there.
<v Speaker 1>There was a kind of a gave striata, which is
<v Speaker 1>common throughout Mexico. I've grown that before. Really prone to rot,
<v Speaker 1>very thin leaves. It's a beautiful plant, very poky, but
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't have spines on the leaf margins like the
<v Speaker 1>genus of Gave. It does. Used to be lumped into
<v Speaker 1>the genus of Gave. They're closely related. They came out
<v Speaker 1>on either side of Manfreda and a phylogeny I guess. Anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>SA saw a bunch of good shit. You know, most
<v Speaker 1>of it occurs in Texas, some of it doesn't. Some
<v Speaker 1>of the cact there. There was Cora phanta robust that.
<v Speaker 1>There was neo Lloydia canoidia, another cool cactus that was flowering.
<v Speaker 1>Now it's coaching Maya conoidiah, calle Andra conferdo, really cool,
<v Speaker 1>little Euphorbia. Damn, I'm gonna I didn't even get to
<v Speaker 1>this stuff we saw in the canyon yesterday. It was
<v Speaker 1>like the canyon we were in yesterday felt like the east.
<v Speaker 1>Excuse me, it felt like the East coast. It felt
<v Speaker 1>like it felt like a you know, like a forest
<v Speaker 1>in Alabama, Georgia or something. Right, very music, very wet,
<v Speaker 1>tons and tons of really interesting stuff. Saw uh there,
<v Speaker 1>well we'll talk about that. And minute I saw a Stophelia,
<v Speaker 1>which is order Eric Kelly's the bladder pott. It's called
<v Speaker 1>Stephilia premlea, which is another rare one bunch of rare
<v Speaker 1>endemics in that little canyon. There were a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>people out too, enjoying it, you know, like families out
<v Speaker 1>and ship. It's really a nice little little arroyo there,
<v Speaker 1>not a royal. It's like a creek. It's lots of
<v Speaker 1>platinus and uh, you know, sycamores and other stuff. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>let's stay focused there. I'm trying to stay focused. So this, uh,
<v Speaker 1>these hills, these xeric scrubland hills were fucking fantastic. And
<v Speaker 1>then we went in Soull the Miura sperm moment. Goddamn,
<v Speaker 1>it was so cool. We were so lucky to be
<v Speaker 1>there at at uh at that time too, like just
<v Speaker 1>the phenology was perfect, that was flowering and just couldn't stop. Man,
<v Speaker 1>I just you get into it out there, and god
<v Speaker 1>damn it, you just it's like pure dopamine rush seeing
<v Speaker 1>all this cool shit. The other thing that was that
<v Speaker 1>was interesting was, you know what we went out to
<v Speaker 1>eat yesterday, went on out to like the Mexican equivalent
<v Speaker 1>of it, Denny. So I forget the name pizzazz or
<v Speaker 1>pad plazas, I forget the name of the spot. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>we went out there stuffed our faces. I really can't
<v Speaker 1>wait to get back to my vegetable steamer where I
<v Speaker 1>can just eat broccoli and fish all day, right, so
<v Speaker 1>I can eat healthy. It's bad enough I live in
<v Speaker 1>Texas because Texas poisons you there. You know, there's no
<v Speaker 1>walking infrastructure. You're forced to drive everywhere, and the food
<v Speaker 1>is all fucking cheese and you know, just just beefy, meaty,
<v Speaker 1>fucking shove it down your gullet, you know, horrible stuff right,
<v Speaker 1>like colon cancer on a plate. But uh but uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>So I want to get back to my little basic
<v Speaker 1>I've I've been steaming a lot of broccoli. Throw some
<v Speaker 1>fucking soy sauce on there, cauliflower, the veggies, Maybe get
<v Speaker 1>some salmon, some tilapia, et cetera. Carrots do a lot
<v Speaker 1>of steam care. I got this fucking vegetable steamer. It
<v Speaker 1>changed my life. Man, it's really did. It's so easy, right,
<v Speaker 1>you just you just fill it up and uh and
<v Speaker 1>like not like a calendar, because that's a pain in
<v Speaker 1>the ass. I like it. There's it's its own appliance, right,
<v Speaker 1>and then it's easy to clean too. And you can
<v Speaker 1>cook anything in there, right, cook some Uh. You know,
<v Speaker 1>my daughter likes to eat hot dogs. I cook her
<v Speaker 1>hot dogs. Okay, we're getting distracted. So we went out
<v Speaker 1>to eat, and you know, we were talking about all
<v Speaker 1>the history, like Mexican Revolution, the Ahito system, why the
<v Speaker 1>land here is in such better shape. You know, there's
<v Speaker 1>more litter, but there's less development, whereas in the United
<v Speaker 1>States there's less litter but there's one hundred times more development.
<v Speaker 1>But and so yeah, we were you know, I guess
<v Speaker 1>I didn't know who was it. Zapata or you know
<v Speaker 1>it was Pancho Villa was a fucking nut job. He
<v Speaker 1>was a real psycho. I guess I didn't know that
<v Speaker 1>he was kind of an asshole. Zapata was pretty cool.
<v Speaker 1>Pancho Villa was a fucking jerk, like a rapist and shit,
<v Speaker 1>I guess so it makes you wonder when you know
<v Speaker 1>next time you eat it a Takorea it's named Pancho Villa, right,
<v Speaker 1>have a little apprehension. Surprise they didn't cancel him down there.
<v Speaker 1>We were talking about how Mexicans don't have the aversion
<v Speaker 1>to the word retard like the Wolk identity politics thing. Again,
<v Speaker 1>no one uses retard to make fun of people that
<v Speaker 1>are mentally disabled, right, You use it for people that
<v Speaker 1>are acting goody. No one would actually make fun of
<v Speaker 1>someone that's mentally disabled. Maybe some kids, because kids can
<v Speaker 1>be cruel, right. But what got me into using it
<v Speaker 1>was the fact that the fucking people you know that
<v Speaker 1>are so annoying, like the Karins and shit, I'm sorry
<v Speaker 1>if this is you, we can just agree to disagree.
<v Speaker 1>But the people that lead it actually like those kinds
<v Speaker 1>of people who look like they already always shit their pants,
<v Speaker 1>generally Caucasian, you know this, constantly pouting mmm, like it's
<v Speaker 1>I the fact that they always had an avert. I
<v Speaker 1>nemver used to say the word retard. When I saw
<v Speaker 1>them having an aversion to it, then I wanted to
<v Speaker 1>use them more. Was like, well, fuck you You're an
<v Speaker 1>annoying plot right now. You make me wanted to You're
<v Speaker 1>like the one that you're the You're the kind of
<v Speaker 1>people that helped get trumpelicted because you were so fucking
<v Speaker 1>insufferable without everything and you have no sense of humor
<v Speaker 1>and your fucking whatever. You know, I've rant about this
<v Speaker 1>all the time. I'm sorry. Really got to break into
<v Speaker 1>it though, a little bit. Guys me nuts. We talked
<v Speaker 1>about that, how there's nothing akin to that in Mexican culture.
<v Speaker 1>And then I was surprised too because I let out
<v Speaker 1>a couple f bombs during a presentation. I can't help it.
<v Speaker 1>I worked for the fucking roil out of fifteen years
<v Speaker 1>and sometimes you just see such stupid shit, especially if
<v Speaker 1>you're talking about modern horticulture, that you gotta let it out.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you get inflamed a little bit. And I
<v Speaker 1>felt bad because I thought that, you know, Mexico is
<v Speaker 1>generally a more socially conservative country. In some ways, it's
<v Speaker 1>very much more liberal and progressive and other Holy fuck,
<v Speaker 1>fucking settle down. Buddy's ship heading a jeep just blazed
<v Speaker 1>by me like one hundred and twenty miles per hour.
<v Speaker 1>What is that in kilometers pro I don't know anyway,
<v Speaker 1>and so, uh, you know, so I thought I was
<v Speaker 1>gonna offend more people there with the F bombs, but uh,
<v Speaker 1>they were like, no, man, like we cursal the Mexican's
<v Speaker 1>curse all the time, Like we as a society curse
<v Speaker 1>all of the time. You know, the China, there's ching goons,
<v Speaker 1>always letting shit out, and uh and it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>people curse on TV here, like dropping F bombs the
<v Speaker 1>Mexican equivalent of an F bomb on TV here. So
<v Speaker 1>so you're fine. And so I was saying, oh, wow,
<v Speaker 1>that's interesting, that's cool to know, okay, and they were like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I don't you know, because they were saying, I read
<v Speaker 1>the comments on your videos sometimes and there's people, you know,
<v Speaker 1>they'd say they get offended, and it always looks like
<v Speaker 1>the kind of person that would be offended, you know
<v Speaker 1>that you say that you swear, and like that's so
<v Speaker 1>foreign to me to us here in Mexic because people
<v Speaker 1>don't really do that. You know, people don't really get
<v Speaker 1>offended at swear words. They're not like slurs, you know.
<v Speaker 1>So it is, it is. It's an American thing, like
<v Speaker 1>both the work identity politics. Of course you get a
<v Speaker 1>little bit of that in Mexican City. But and then
<v Speaker 1>of course the well certainly the right wing version of
<v Speaker 1>that nut job, where as American too. But that being
<v Speaker 1>offended it as swear words, right, like it's it's so
<v Speaker 1>that that is so fucking weird to me, and you
<v Speaker 1>don't you be offended it. I can understand being offended
<v Speaker 1>at slurs, right, except retard, which is not a slur,
<v Speaker 1>despite what some fucking Karen's gonna think. It's an able.
<v Speaker 1>It's a slurry shot. That fuck up, shut up, shut up.
<v Speaker 1>I just just do you you want to like police
<v Speaker 1>other people and feel good about it, That's what it is.
<v Speaker 1>Be honest about at least a God damn, I got
<v Speaker 1>another toll to go through. So uh so, Yeah, that
<v Speaker 1>was an enlightening conversation that we just talked about Mexican history,
<v Speaker 1>which is just so fascinating to me. The haciendas, the
<v Speaker 1>fucking the ruling class, the overlords that were taking land
<v Speaker 1>away from people. Imagine if that had happened in the
<v Speaker 1>United States, right, it should have really should have. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was funny. I wanted to go get the stogies
<v Speaker 1>last night because you can get Cuban cigars here. And
<v Speaker 1>I like cigars. I know it's fucking corny. I'm like
<v Speaker 1>a you know, pre emergent old man, but just fucking
<v Speaker 1>let me be and so uh and you know, because
<v Speaker 1>you don't get that. I used to smoke cigarettes and
<v Speaker 1>I quit like fifteen years ago, thank god. But damn,
<v Speaker 1>it's so nice to be able to just puff on
<v Speaker 1>a cigar because you don't take it into your lungs.
<v Speaker 1>You still just you know, absorbing it through the blood
<v Speaker 1>vessels in your mouth, and you also taste it. And
<v Speaker 1>it's nice when you have a nice one. So I
<v Speaker 1>wanted to get a Cuban so we went to this.
<v Speaker 1>We went to this by all the cigar stores were
<v Speaker 1>in the rich area of Monterey, you know San Pedro too,
<v Speaker 1>which is like car dealerships. You imagine everyone have to
<v Speaker 1>people to live there. Fucking plastic surgeons too, because that's
<v Speaker 1>really big down here. You know mar al Lago face,
<v Speaker 1>You get your lips slapped around, get some shit injected
<v Speaker 1>to them. They take fat from your ass and put
<v Speaker 1>it in your cheeks. What do they do? What's the
<v Speaker 1>life of a plastic surgeon in Monterrey? Like I wonder right,
<v Speaker 1>how does it differ from the life of a plastic
<v Speaker 1>surgeon in fucking Miami or god, what a what a
<v Speaker 1>weird world we live in? What a weird world? Oh,
<v Speaker 1>it's so funny. It's it's really when you see like
<v Speaker 1>a good plastic surgery face, like a good fucking you
<v Speaker 1>know what I mean, Like someone who's like it just
<v Speaker 1>looks good, not in a good way good, it looks
<v Speaker 1>good in a bad way, like it's funny, like they
<v Speaker 1>look like a lizard, like a just so ridiculous. It's
<v Speaker 1>it's hilarious, like it's it's a it's it is. It's
<v Speaker 1>an enjoyable thing to think about. For me, at least,
<v Speaker 1>I think it's fucking hilarious. Ok So yeah, But so
<v Speaker 1>we were driving through San Pedro owners all these like
<v Speaker 1>car dealerships. They get the you know BYD dealerships, the
<v Speaker 1>electric cars you can't sell in the US because it
<v Speaker 1>competes with Tesla and and uh, you know, a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of fancy ship. It was a fancy neighborhood. It's like
<v Speaker 1>on the other side of this little mountain had some
<v Speaker 1>curb cool murals on this giant wall on either side
<v Speaker 1>of the mountain too. But so we go. We yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we get these these stogies, and it was like in
<v Speaker 1>this like kind of wretched mall. It was super frace
<v Speaker 1>of super fancy, but it was like six bucks for
<v Speaker 1>a decent cigar. So it was nice. It was nice
<v Speaker 1>to indulge. And I'm glad that Adrian was down to
<v Speaker 1>try it too, so I got a photo of him later.
<v Speaker 1>He looked like a fucking general. He was wearing like
<v Speaker 1>this green army shirt, like buttoned down army shirt in
<v Speaker 1>a little head and he was smoking a stogy. It
<v Speaker 1>was funny. I was like, man, you look like some
<v Speaker 1>sort of fucking like Cuban general. Right now? Is this
<v Speaker 1>the right way? Yeah? Right now? So there we go.
<v Speaker 1>God damn it. Kuota not Libra, not not the Libramento.
<v Speaker 1>We want the toll road and get they're faster. But
<v Speaker 1>the river that goes through Montterrey, the Rio Santa Catarina,
<v Speaker 1>is it's a beauty. I mean it could be a
<v Speaker 1>fucking beautiful river. It could be like a bike path
<v Speaker 1>and like running path and nature trails and shit. And
<v Speaker 1>I guess they used to have golf courses there and
<v Speaker 1>go karts and it all got destroyed. Twenty years ago
<v Speaker 1>in an epic flood. But you know it could be
<v Speaker 1>like a wonderful spot, and I guess there are groups
<v Speaker 1>working to restore it into a wonderful spot, to fill
<v Speaker 1>with native plants, with some of the cool flora. And
<v Speaker 1>it's right there. You know, you have at the gateway
<v Speaker 1>to the to the mountains. Right which the mountains are
<v Speaker 1>these horizontal beds of limestone that have been flipped up
<v Speaker 1>nearly vertically. Look at it on a map, man, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>look at it on like Google terrain layer and you'll
<v Speaker 1>see what I'm talking about. All these fold thrust belts,
<v Speaker 1>incredible geology, These these these horizontal bedding planes flipped up
<v Speaker 1>at like eighty degree angles that have basically made it
<v Speaker 1>possible for all these rock wall plants to evolve their
<v Speaker 1>like a gave albo palosa, which was just described twenty
<v Speaker 1>years ago, and all the you know, the hanging gardens
<v Speaker 1>of Nuevo Leone, the hanging gardens of Monterrey, Mexico. There's
<v Speaker 1>a ton of Moretonia gregy guy there too, which is
<v Speaker 1>a plant we only get very sparingly in South Texas.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, the I guess the municipality goes in
<v Speaker 1>and it's the same stupid shit they do where I live,
<v Speaker 1>where they clear out all the vegetation of the river
<v Speaker 1>because they think that it's gonna clog the river. It's messy,
<v Speaker 1>And it's like these really archaic views on plant life
<v Speaker 1>that I'm all too used to seeing, especially where I live.
<v Speaker 1>That if you know, if we don't clear this stuff
<v Speaker 1>out and cut it down and remove it and just
<v Speaker 1>have a barren, bleak, fucking waterway that's dry most of
<v Speaker 1>the year anyway, if we don't do that, then when
<v Speaker 1>it floods, it's gonna it's gonna clog. It's gonna quote
<v Speaker 1>clog up, right, Like, well, what did it do in
<v Speaker 1>the last fucking the last you know, however many millions
<v Speaker 1>of years did it clog up? Then No, it's fucking fine, Like,
<v Speaker 1>don't worry about it, just stop fucking with it, right,
<v Speaker 1>things could be so nice, But you think there's just
<v Speaker 1>no sense behind any of this shit. So I think
<v Speaker 1>I think there's a group. I would love to learn
<v Speaker 1>more about them. I forget, I forget the name of them,
<v Speaker 1>But there's a group working to restore that river. And
<v Speaker 1>and you know, because that's where you need plant life
<v Speaker 1>the most. Man, that's where you need you need native
<v Speaker 1>plant life the most is around cities, or you need
<v Speaker 1>them where the people are so that people can be
<v Speaker 1>exposed to them and appreciate them instead of just having
<v Speaker 1>these you know, abject shitholes of concrete and cars. Like
<v Speaker 1>the car thing in Monterey is insane. Cities just held
<v Speaker 1>hostage by cars, right, like, just just not much public
<v Speaker 1>translit I think they got a monorail and maybe an
<v Speaker 1>aerial subway, but but there's just cars everywhere. It's all
<v Speaker 1>for it's all car shit, and so you know, so
<v Speaker 1>if you have to if you want to get somewhere,
<v Speaker 1>you've got to be in a car. And then the
<v Speaker 1>fucking ariage just thinks it's polluted as shit. Everybody drives
<v Speaker 1>like assholes. It's just a mess. Cars turn people into
<v Speaker 1>assholes anyway. Right, you're behind this glass. You just want
<v Speaker 1>to go, go, go, get out of my way. You're upset,
<v Speaker 1>you're isolated from people, Like people behave ways in cars
<v Speaker 1>that they would never behave if they were just you know,
<v Speaker 1>walking next to someone you know, or sitting next to
<v Speaker 1>them on a subway whatever. So it's weird and they're
<v Speaker 1>still I mean, they just want to be like Texas
<v Speaker 1>too so much, you know, so they're found the same
<v Speaker 1>mono rays doing this and they're building the same shit
<v Speaker 1>that Texas is building. Right, Like if you drive through
<v Speaker 1>San Antonio, you see all these just never ending infrastructure
<v Speaker 1>projects for roads and freeways. It's like, man, at what
<v Speaker 1>point do we just start building things differently? And then
<v Speaker 1>you know, at what point is the amount of land
<v Speaker 1>that you've seated over to cars? Does it just is?
<v Speaker 1>It is? It just doesn't make any sense. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's just you've you've lost You've seated so much space
<v Speaker 1>to cars. There's barely enough for people anymore, you know,
<v Speaker 1>or for infrastructure, Like what could that space be used
<v Speaker 1>for if you took all of all the cars away,
<v Speaker 1>or or you know, made spaces that were made neighborhoods
<v Speaker 1>that you couldn't drive to the park on the outside
<v Speaker 1>of it and it was built for walking and public
<v Speaker 1>transit and shit. So I don't know. I ran about
<v Speaker 1>this stuff all the time, I know, but god damn,
<v Speaker 1>it's just we're gonna look back on this and the
<v Speaker 1>way that we have cars and cities throughout the West.
<v Speaker 1>We're gonna look back on this in one hundred years
<v Speaker 1>if we haven't gone extinct, and you know, we're gonna
<v Speaker 1>look back on the same way we look at you know,
<v Speaker 1>the fact that he used to be able to smoke
<v Speaker 1>on an airplane. It's the same thing. It's just fucking insane.
<v Speaker 1>It's irrational. It's it's it's there's so many people doing theory.
<v Speaker 1>It's good, but there's so many people doing it that
<v Speaker 1>it gets it's highly inefficient. All right, So anyway, let's
<v Speaker 1>talk about let's talk about the uh the canyon we
<v Speaker 1>went to yesterday because that was phenomenal last Ansuela and
<v Speaker 1>we had like a little group hike we arranged. I
<v Speaker 1>just posted it on social media. We mentioned it the
<v Speaker 1>day before and then I posted on social media and
<v Speaker 1>we had it out there, and you know, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>this basically found this streambed that goes into the mountains,
<v Speaker 1>into the nooks and crannies of the mountains. Again, look
<v Speaker 1>at the Sierra Madre, the northern Sierra Madre, and it's
<v Speaker 1>just all these folds and all these little nooks and
<v Speaker 1>crannies for plants to grow in, and you know, a
<v Speaker 1>much milder, more music habitat than the surrounding opened Xeric
<v Speaker 1>Xeric Lands. There was a cool Arisima in there too,
<v Speaker 1>which is a terrestrial aerid you get throughout eastern North America.
<v Speaker 1>I think this was Arissima kelsicola. It looked like Dracontium,
<v Speaker 1>but I guess it's it's different enough that it was
<v Speaker 1>actually placed in its own beacies in the I think
<v Speaker 1>last year, in twenty twenty five. But by far one
<v Speaker 1>of my favorites that I saw there was Colubrina greggy
<v Speaker 1>I same genus as Colubrina texana, which is known as
<v Speaker 1>the hog plum and throughout South Texas. But this thing
<v Speaker 1>was a fucking tree and just covered you know, red
<v Speaker 1>buckthorpe family ram nascy. So you got the stamens alternating
<v Speaker 1>with the petals alternating with the sepals, but the the
<v Speaker 1>nectar discs on these flowers. The flowers were a little
<v Speaker 1>bit smaller than a marble, maybe about I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>seven millimeters across, but the nectar discs were glistening that
<v Speaker 1>were filled with nectar, and the leaves were huge. It's obviously,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because hog plum Colabrina texana is like a
<v Speaker 1>sandsheet plant built for the heat. It's got a cool
<v Speaker 1>zigzag leaf branching structure. But this thing was like a
<v Speaker 1>small tree, just a careally cool plant be really cool
<v Speaker 1>to grow in Texas. It probably did at one point
<v Speaker 1>a long long time ago, pre certainly pre Europeans, probably
<v Speaker 1>pre almost sapiens in the New World. And so that
<v Speaker 1>was really fucking wild to see because I saw him
<v Speaker 1>like this is a goddamn buckthorn. The flowers and the
<v Speaker 1>leaf shape, the leaves kind of the venation kind of
<v Speaker 1>looks like se and know this leaves. But it was
<v Speaker 1>huge and was growing in this arroyo. I saw sin
<v Speaker 1>Bechia there as well, which is you know only today
<v Speaker 1>only grows in San Benito, home of the Freddy Fender
<v Speaker 1>water Tower, the water tower with the Freddy Friender mua
<v Speaker 1>on the outside. You know Texas tornadoes, you know, you
<v Speaker 1>know Freddy Fender. And and that's the last I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's the last population in the United States. There used
<v Speaker 1>to be another one that got destroyed. I guess it's
<v Speaker 1>Citrus family rutasi. It's a beautiful tree. I've got a
<v Speaker 1>few of them in my yard. I've planted a few out.
<v Speaker 1>They take a while to get going. They actually kind
<v Speaker 1>of tend to like sun but they like some water too,
<v Speaker 1>they like some moisture too, and so that I didn't
<v Speaker 1>expect to see that in this little canyon either. It's wild,
<v Speaker 1>and so that again it gives me context. It's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>this is where it's growing today, but it used to
<v Speaker 1>grow in South Texas at some point, probably during the
<v Speaker 1>Pleistocene when it was a milder climate down there, you know,
<v Speaker 1>whereas now it's so hot, and so these things are
<v Speaker 1>just kind of left over. It's it's thinking about that.
<v Speaker 1>Shit is so cool. It's like, what you know that
<v Speaker 1>the David Axelrod I was always talking about. It wasn't
<v Speaker 1>hold on Daniel with David. I always getting confused. Daniel Axlerod,
<v Speaker 1>excuse me. He wrote Origins of the California Flora. He
<v Speaker 1>was a botanist that passed away in nineteen ninety eight.
<v Speaker 1>It did a lot of work in California. But he
<v Speaker 1>was always writing about distributions of these plants, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>he was a paleobotanist. I think that was his man.
<v Speaker 1>I think he was a paleobotanist, but basically trying to
<v Speaker 1>reconstruct distributions of plants and climates and really taking this
<v Speaker 1>kind of broad scale view on the whole landscape, which
<v Speaker 1>I think is just so fucking fascinating, man, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and he was. He would wrote papers about like the
<v Speaker 1>the Miocene flora of western Nevada, which you know, Western
<v Speaker 1>Nevada now is super dry, but twelve million years ago
<v Speaker 1>there were redwoods growing there. Let me beat this, We
<v Speaker 1>beat this, car, I gotta get up there. It's so
<v Speaker 1>cool to see the landscape change where we are right
<v Speaker 1>now we're at lower elevation mont Rays at like thirteen
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet. Now we're dropping down, getting more into the
<v Speaker 1>undulating you know, tom a leap and thorn scrub, which
<v Speaker 1>is generally speaking hot as balls. God, it's just in
<v Speaker 1>such good shape, man, Just like just oceans of green
<v Speaker 1>with no development. So different from what most of South Texas,
<v Speaker 1>but most of the Rio Graham Valley has become. So
<v Speaker 1>nice to see. God, just a bummerers, a lot of
<v Speaker 1>cartel activity here. They saw, you know, what are you
<v Speaker 1>gonna do? So you're gonna get kidnapped? Maybe wait it
<v Speaker 1>might head now you'll be fine. So uh So, anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so these this little canyon, there was all kinds of
<v Speaker 1>cool shit in there. It was like a two miles in,
<v Speaker 1>two miles out, but you can go a lot deeper.
<v Speaker 1>There was about Hindia there too, that was quite abundant,
<v Speaker 1>a native about Hinia. And then there was like blackbrush.
<v Speaker 1>It's it was so wild to see blackbrush growing with
<v Speaker 1>poison ivy, Like there's poison ivy in there, which we
<v Speaker 1>don't really get in the valley. I've only seen it
<v Speaker 1>one place in South Texas. But it's abundant. There was
<v Speaker 1>you know, moist enough for it. And then in the
<v Speaker 1>low the areas by the streams, Oh yeah, we saw
<v Speaker 1>fucking kowates too. They're like little neotropical raccoons and they
<v Speaker 1>were really like really adapted to people, Like they were
<v Speaker 1>really comfortable around people. You could tell people Proba been
<v Speaker 1>feeding them. It was fucking nuts to see such cool
<v Speaker 1>little critters. So yeah, but there was Xantha somma robust them,
<v Speaker 1>which is an aeroid like terrestrial aeroid that I was
<v Speaker 1>surprised to see. I thought it was the invasive what's
<v Speaker 1>the thing that grows around Austin is a alocascia. It's
<v Speaker 1>like an aquatic aquatic aeroid that's invasive around Austin the
<v Speaker 1>Austin area. But Xantha soma, you know, was a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of this stuff should be reintroduced on the other side
<v Speaker 1>of the border, right, because the way the climate's going,
<v Speaker 1>it's gonna have to migrate north at some point, and
<v Speaker 1>the less freezes that you get, the warm though warmer
<v Speaker 1>it gets, some of this stuff should really be being
<v Speaker 1>grown up there. It's again, nothing, nothing reinforces how pointless
<v Speaker 1>geopolitical borders are. Like studying plant life, right, Texas plants
<v Speaker 1>are all Mexican plants. That's the same habitat. It's it's
<v Speaker 1>these plants and this land. They're way older than these
<v Speaker 1>silly geopolitical borders that humans take. So seriously, God, people
<v Speaker 1>could be fucking depressing. Can't thing? Can't human society just
<v Speaker 1>be a fucking drag. It's really really just just fucking
<v Speaker 1>silly and stupid and just full of shit. And anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so uh, they're all kinds of cool millipedes out yesterday
<v Speaker 1>and the canyon too, something that really surprised me. Oh
<v Speaker 1>and tons of cool ferns too, I like anemias. There
<v Speaker 1>was tectaria heracically a folia, tons of oak diversity there, Quircus, polymorpha,
<v Speaker 1>crotons everywhere. But something that really surprised me was I
<v Speaker 1>saw what looked like mex amount of Philippines, which is
<v Speaker 1>a plant that I love. I've grown a bunch of it.
<v Speaker 1>I got a couple in my yard, just a farm
<v Speaker 1>set off of it gets like five six feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>It's more of a thorn scrub plant. But I saw
<v Speaker 1>a relative of it, baits Amalva violasia, which turned out
<v Speaker 1>to be really rare. It has much larger purple you know,
<v Speaker 1>showy ass flowers, larger leaves. It's basically a more music
<v Speaker 1>adapted version of Maximova Philippies. And it's a microandemic too.
<v Speaker 1>It's only known from this little canyon. It doesn't grow
<v Speaker 1>very it grows in very few other places, which is
<v Speaker 1>exciting to see. It's I got. This thing is like
<v Speaker 1>so localized. You know, it probably grows in a couple
<v Speaker 1>other places throughout the Sierra Madre. But you know, it
<v Speaker 1>was so cool. At the end of the trail too.
<v Speaker 1>You can look above the tree line. You go kind
<v Speaker 1>of up on this ridge a little bit and you
<v Speaker 1>can see this just this massive monolith of limestone, just
<v Speaker 1>covered in brahea palms and yuccas and all kinds of
<v Speaker 1>cool shit. You know pines. God, just these giant like
<v Speaker 1>flat you know, sheer, sheer faced rock walls on this
<v Speaker 1>this giant brick of uplifted limestone, remnants of the Western
<v Speaker 1>Interior seaway. So anyway, so there was bits of Maalva,
<v Speaker 1>bits of Malva violasia. There was some red buds there,
<v Speaker 1>so Ursus canadensis Eastern red buds. What was the There
<v Speaker 1>was Morris rubra another. I'm telling you a lot of
<v Speaker 1>ship that you see and it felt like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>it felt like Alabama Georgia border, like northern Alabama Georgia border,
<v Speaker 1>like those humid forests there. Yeah, Staphilea FRINGLEI was cool
<v Speaker 1>to see the bladder pod, which again i've seen Staphilea.
<v Speaker 1>I for hear what species it was of staph Alea
<v Speaker 1>that I saw, but in Alabama border. Eric Hayley's it's
<v Speaker 1>in staphaly Ace it's own family. There was saw this
<v Speaker 1>really beautiful vine Cannavalia septantia analysis. It was a beautiful
<v Speaker 1>pink flower or superinnate large apoleonaceous that is p flower
<v Speaker 1>from the Faboides subfamily, so banner wings and keel. But
<v Speaker 1>it was flipped over. It was huge, it was pink
<v Speaker 1>had a twisted keel. That'd be a dope vine to grow. Goddamn,
<v Speaker 1>it would be really cool to grow one of those.
<v Speaker 1>But there were no seeds saw that there. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna leave There's gonna be stuff I leave out
<v Speaker 1>because there's so much cool cool ship and Missia Zygo maris,
<v Speaker 1>which was another Favid you know with yellow flowered favorite.
<v Speaker 1>This wasn't in It wasn't in flower, but really unique
<v Speaker 1>leaves right like really it was an herb probably herbaceous perennial,
<v Speaker 1>probably has a big root in the ground, but this
<v Speaker 1>thing was like rubbery leaves, no hairs on them, growing
<v Speaker 1>in the understory of this forest on the side of
<v Speaker 1>a creek that was filled with all the cool aquatic beetles.
<v Speaker 1>Vike Ethia mexicana was fucking great to see too. I
<v Speaker 1>think Barton Springs Nursery in Austin used to sell that,
<v Speaker 1>probably for too much money, but anyway, that's none of
<v Speaker 1>my business. But it's you know, that's a composite. It
<v Speaker 1>looks like a kind of like a sunflower. Man, it's
<v Speaker 1>just the dyc but it's got these really really cool
<v Speaker 1>long recurved eries. The bracts on the side of the
<v Speaker 1>flower head, on the side of the involkar, and it's bizarre.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think it's you know, closely related. There might
<v Speaker 1>be one other species in the genus may maybe not
<v Speaker 1>even I first saw it at U. C. Berkeley in
<v Speaker 1>the botanic garden there. It's the best botanic garden in
<v Speaker 1>a country by far, like a science botanic garden, a
<v Speaker 1>living museum of Earth's plant life. Right, it's not a
<v Speaker 1>show garden. But that was when I first became familiar
<v Speaker 1>with it. But again, to see it, you know, flowering
<v Speaker 1>and habitat on the edge of a limestone creek with
<v Speaker 1>you know, in the understory of oaks and sycamores and
<v Speaker 1>all kinds of other cool shit and something else. So
<v Speaker 1>it's just so nice to be Oh yeah, there was
<v Speaker 1>acer granted than Tatum two big big tooth maple, which
<v Speaker 1>is I think I think I've seen that in the
<v Speaker 1>Southwest as well. I've seen that in Arizona. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>but you get it in Texas as well. Maple's normally
<v Speaker 1>like a lot of water. It was crazy. It's always
<v Speaker 1>weird to see them in Xeric areas. But again, this
<v Speaker 1>is like a little refugia a little canyon right, it's
<v Speaker 1>like a much more humid than the surrounding lowlands. The
<v Speaker 1>funck else that we have. You have a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>crotons phidal lacca. There was a mimo Phytum cardiophylum, which
<v Speaker 1>is baragin ac little blue flowered baragein ace seed them
<v Speaker 1>palm rise. There was some Pepperomia's packer at koelnsis Selena
<v Speaker 1>sirius spinulosis was everywhere, which that used to occur in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas too. I think it's been wiped out except
<v Speaker 1>for cultivation. It gets a huge, you know, night blooming
<v Speaker 1>moth plinated flower on it. I got some in my yard,
<v Speaker 1>really easy to grow from cutting. But but it likes
<v Speaker 1>it humid. It's it's likes it. It's a humid loving
<v Speaker 1>plant that likes a lot of water. It likes growing
<v Speaker 1>in the shade, likes growing, you know, up a tree.
<v Speaker 1>I planted some of my buddy on Brace's yard and
<v Speaker 1>it's like twenty feet up this oak tree. Now it's
<v Speaker 1>a fucking dope plant. It's really cool, you know. Sure
<v Speaker 1>some with your friends. There was jug lance molus everywhere
<v Speaker 1>as well. A wooly walnut jug lance molus, which I've
<v Speaker 1>seen in the Wava laone before. I don't think that
<v Speaker 1>gets into Texas at all. But it smells the flowers
<v Speaker 1>smell fucking incredible under the flowers, the leaves. Excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>it's really pleasant smelling walnut lithough spermum nel sonya with
<v Speaker 1>white flowers. God damn it. I keep hitting these fucking butterflies.
<v Speaker 1>Such a drag. It's beautiful sulfur butterflies. And Uh Randia
<v Speaker 1>leida virans, which the genus Randia uh is ruby ac.
<v Speaker 1>It's the coffee family we get. I think it's Randia
<v Speaker 1>ab cordata in in South Texas, but like closer to
<v Speaker 1>the gulf, it likes the more humid and it's much
<v Speaker 1>more spiny. And this is more of like a music shrubs.
<v Speaker 1>They've got the kind of spines. It's got thorns, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the branches taper uh and become taper into a point.
<v Speaker 1>But it wasn't this was this was you know, more
<v Speaker 1>more humid adapted, more music grows in miud of their
<v Speaker 1>climate growing in the understory. Saw that when we when
<v Speaker 1>we saw the pack of coates mobbing up on people,
<v Speaker 1>not mobbing up they were looking for handouts here, know
<v Speaker 1>these fucking coates they're looking They're always looking for handouts.
<v Speaker 1>But overall, just a ton of diversity. Man, it was.
<v Speaker 1>It was really really wonderful. It's in this little king
<v Speaker 1>there was shited ton of people around. Whatever. It was
<v Speaker 1>still a great time, right E Gavarious simulans I saw
<v Speaker 1>there as well. Yeah it was Bohemia macrantha, which Bohemia
<v Speaker 1>has always got showy flowers, but the ones that get
<v Speaker 1>planted in South Texas are always the ones from Asia
<v Speaker 1>when Mexico has so many cool ones. All right, I'm
<v Speaker 1>back in Texas. Just that was an easy crossing, real brief.
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't too bad. It wasn't even painful. Only put
<v Speaker 1>me mildly painful. Part was having to return the vehicle
<v Speaker 1>permit and all that bullshit the migration forms. It just
<v Speaker 1>fucking pointless bureaucracy. H I love that part when you're
<v Speaker 1>going over the back, over the bridge though the arms
<v Speaker 1>Wilds Bridge, and you go buy all these like these,
<v Speaker 1>You go by like six or seven dead billboards. It's
<v Speaker 1>just a frame. There's nothing up on him anymore. Looks
<v Speaker 1>very post apocalyptic. Over the flood plain of the Rio Grand.
<v Speaker 1>It's some beautiful scenery, post apocalyptic. Like you know, we
<v Speaker 1>always love seeing dead billboards, right, much better than seeing
<v Speaker 1>ones that are actively being used, especially the led ones.
<v Speaker 1>But uh yeah, it's a fucking beautiful day outside, like
<v Speaker 1>cloudy and cloudy with a little bit of blue sky,
<v Speaker 1>and uh it's perfect temperature. And here hopefully you got
<v Speaker 1>something out today. Back to the dystopia, the commercial dystopia
<v Speaker 1>of the Rio Grand Valley. But ooh, a big big
<v Speaker 1>cluster of the white phenotype of Solanum eliegnafolium. So all right,
<v Speaker 1>till next time, have aggress your day, go fund yourself.
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, I'll be going on tour in the Southwest
<v Speaker 1>starting May twenty seventh. May twenty seventh of being Alpine,
<v Speaker 1>Texas doing a signing at Front Street Books, and then
<v Speaker 1>we're going to La and then we're going San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson.
<v Speaker 1>Trying to book Alos CRUs show Las Cruse in Las
<v Speaker 1>Cruse de New Mexico. And we couldn't line up in
<v Speaker 1>a Paslo show though I don't know why. Well we
<v Speaker 1>didn't really try too hard, but we couldn't find a venue.
<v Speaker 1>If you want dates, go to the crimepace website and
<v Speaker 1>it's under events all right, that's all. I gotta have
<v Speaker 1>a guess to day. Go fuck yourself by